Cerebras’ blockbuster IPO boosts hype for SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic

Cerebras Systems‘ raucous IPO this week gave investors a taste of what’s to come in artificial intelligence. But it also served as a reminder of how hard it is for non-AI companies to capture Wall Street’s attention.

Shares of the AI chipmaker popped almost 70% in their market debut on Thursday, lifting the company’s market cap to about $95 billion. Only two tech companies have ever closed their first day of trading in the U.S. with valuations of $100 billion or more: Alibaba and Facebook.

Cerebras also holds the distinction of largest IPO of the year and the biggest offering for a U.S. tech company since Uber hit the market in 2019.

While the excitement around Cerebras would seem to bode well for a tech IPO market that’s been largely dormant for the past four-plus years, the problem for just about every company in the pipeline is that they’re not named SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic.

Those three companies — each valued near or above $1 trillion — are in some stage of IPO prep, with SpaceX expected to file its public prospectus as soon as next week and the other two eyeing debuts later this year. Their offerings will dwarf anything that’s come before them and serve to further illustrate how small all the other multibillion-dollar pre-IPO companies are by comparison.

“It’s very hard to care about anything other than the $3 trillion potential IPOs that, in theory, are going to happen in the next year,” Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures, told CNBC’s “The Exchange” on Thursday.

The market has been a challenge for emerging tech companies since early 2022, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risk. There have been occasional pockets of activity since then, but U.S. venture-backed exit value last year was less than one-third the peak in 2021, according to the National Venture Capital Association’s annual yearbook, and tech IPOs this year have been almost nonexistent.

Cerebras presented investors with one of their first opportunities to get in on the AI boom with a pure-play tech stock, as all the action to date has been in the private market. The biggest prior offering in the space was AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in March of last year and is now valued at over $58 billion.

Lise Buyer, founder of IPO advisory firm Class V group, said late-stage startups are in a period of “pragmatic preparation,” looking for potential signs of receptivity. But, she said, the market needs more data points before it can be declared open.

The conundrum for many of the high-valued startups isn’t just that the AI models are sucking up all the oxygen. The companies are also reckoning with the reality that the only thing ginning up excitement is AI, and the vast majority of companies in the pre-IPO category were created well before the launch of ChatGPT and the the start of the generative AI craze.

“It’s a story of haves and have-nots,” said Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures. “If you have a really strong AI story, you can go out, but if you’re a SaaS company that doesn’t have a lot of AI buzz, you’re going to have a hard time getting public market interest right now.”

Companies in SaaS, or software-as-a-service, have been some of the hardest hit by the public market on concern that many of their products will be, to some degree, replaced by AI models and agents.

For so-called AI native companies, Das said many will likely hold off on going public as they scale, or wait to see what demand looks like following OpenAI and Anthropic.

Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark, said companies preparing for IPOs want to see others take the leap first and show that the market is receptive.

“It’s going to encourage people to say, ‘Hey, jump in, the water’s warm,'” he said.

Cerebras is a good start, but it’s a unique case. The company hit the market during a silicon renaissance, with shares of Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron all soaring and demand surging for chips tied to any part of the AI stack. Cerebras claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster than graphics processing units from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.