Cerebras ($CBRS) Systems went public on May 14th, priced at $185 and closing the day at $311 — a 68% first-day gain and the largest U.S. tech IPO debut since Uber.

The company raised $5.55 billion and finished the day with a market cap around $95 billion. The headline numbers are striking. The nuance matters more for investors deciding what to hold and what to watch.

Cerebras builds wafer-scale processors optimized for AI inference — the work models do every time they respond. Their chips deliver faster inference speeds than traditional GPU-based systems, which matters for customers with strict latency and throughput needs.

Revenue rose to $510 million in 2025, up 76% from $290 million in 2024. Demand is real; growth is real.

The dominant concern is customer concentration. Cerebras reports a $24.6 billion order backlog, and roughly $20 billion of that is tied to a single cloud agreement with OpenAI.

That deal is both the company’s biggest asset and its biggest vulnerability. Morningstar senior equity analyst Brian Colello told investors the OpenAI agreement is central to Cerebras’ valuation and that the main risks are aggressive competition in AI inference and heavy customer concentration. If OpenAI scales back purchases or accelerates in-house capacity, Cerebras would feel it immediately.

At current prices, Cerebras trades at roughly 135x trailing sales based on floating shares and $510 million in 2025 revenue—roughly five to six times Nvidia’s comparable trailing multiple (~21x–27x). That valuation assumes years of near-perfect execution

Cerebras also aims to deploy roughly 250 megawatts of computing capacity for OpenAI by the end of 2026 — the largest data-center project the company has attempted. Delivery and operational execution at that scale are meaningful risks, not theoretical ones.

Cerebras was priced at $185. Investors who got in early watched it jump to $350 on day one — a 89% gain before most people had finished their morning coffee. By Friday it had pulled back to around $280.

That's the pattern. The pop goes to the people already positioned. Everyone else buys the headline.

Pre-IPO access has historically been reserved for institutional investors, Wall Street banks, and high-net-worth clients. The average investor doesn't get the call. They get the news after the fact, at prices that already reflect the excitement.

That's starting to change. And SpaceX — which filed its confidential S-1 in April and is targeting what could be the largest IPO in history — may be the most important test of that shift yet.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks are likely right behind it. The AI IPO wave is not a rumor. It's a pipeline. And the window to think clearly about it — before it becomes a full media frenzy — is closing.