Investing.com -- AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc (NASDAQ: CBRS) is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market today, after pricing its initial public offering at $185 per share on Wednesday — well above its guided range — marking it the largest U.S. IPO of the year.

The Santa Clara-based company raised $5.55 billion by selling 30 million shares, blowing past the original terms of 28 million shares at $115-$125 each, which had been revised higher to $150-$160 before the overnight pricing. The final price implies a fully diluted valuation of over $56 billion, more than double the roughly $23 billion private valuation Cerebras carried as recently as February 2026. Underwriters — Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS — also hold a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 4.5 million shares, which could lift total proceeds by as much as $832.5 million.

Demand was extraordinary: Reuters reported that institutional orders exceeded available shares by more than 20 times, forcing the company to twice raise both the price range and share count during the roadshow.

Cerebras makes its Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), a processor that uses an entire silicon wafer rather than dicing it into smaller chips, yielding 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 cores. That architecture puts it in direct competition with Nvidia in the fast-growing AI inference market. The company has moved quickly to lock in major customers: in early 2026 it signed a $20 billion, 750-megawatt deal with OpenAI, and in March Amazon Web Services announced a partnership to offer the WSE to cloud customers, with Amazon reportedly purchasing $270 million in Cerebras stock as part of the arrangement.

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025, reached $510 million, up 75% from $290.3 million the prior year, per an SEC filing. The company posted an operating loss of $345 million for the same period. Perhaps more striking is its remaining performance obligation: $24.6 billion in contractually committed but not yet recognized revenue — roughly 48 times 2025 sales.

This is Cerebras’ second attempt to go public. The company first filed in 2024 but withdrew after its partnership with UAE-based AI firm G42, which accounted for more than 80% of its revenue in the first half of that year, triggered a national security review by CFIUS. The committee eventually cleared the deal.

Ahead of the highly anticipated IPO, reports surfaced earlier in the week that Arm Holdings and SoftBank Group Corp. attempted to acquire the company with a last-minute bid. According to the reports from Bloomberg, Cerebras rebuffed the offer.

The debut lands in a buoyant market for new listings. U.S. IPO proceeds have more than doubled year-to-date in 2026 to $22.3 billion, according to data from Dealogic, driven by investor appetite for AI- and defense-linked offerings. Cerebras alone accounts for roughly a quarter of that total. Later in the year, IPO from SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are expected to hit the market. The Cerebras will provide a litmus test for investor demand for new AI listings.