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It was the kind of debut that makes Wall Street stop mid-sentence. On Thursday, Cerebras Systems — the AI chipmaker that withdrew its own IPO filing just seven months ago — roared onto the Nasdaq with a 68% first-day surge that pushed its market capitalization to the threshold of $100 billion and minted two brand-new members of the tech billionaire club before the closing bell had finished ringing.

CEO Andrew Feldman, who co-founded Cerebras roughly a decade ago from a conviction that the AI industry needed an entirely new class of chip, now holds a stake worth approximately $3.2 billion. His technology chief and co-founder Sean Lie owns shares valued at $1.7 billion. In a single trading session, the fruits of a decade of white-knuckle innovation became undeniable.

From Withdrawal to the Largest IPO of 2026

The arc of Cerebras's path to public markets is itself a story of nerve. Last October, the company pulled its IPO filing — a decision that, at the time, read like a retreat. Instead, it was a strategic pivot. Cerebras chose to raise private capital, and in February 2026 secured a valuation of $23.1 billion from investors.

Thursday's market verdict rendered that figure almost quaint.

The company raised $5.55 billion in its Nasdaq offering — the largest IPO of the year by a considerable margin — and immediately rode a wave of investor hunger for AI infrastructure that has simultaneously lifted shares of Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Micron to multi-year highs.

"We have tremendous opportunities for growth, and this was the right way to fund our growth," Feldman told CNBC's "Squawk Box" Thursday morning, hours before the scale of the market's endorsement became fully clear. The company, he said, had reached the level of maturity where accessing public markets "made sense."

A Windfall for the Believers Who Bet Early

For Silicon Valley's venture capitalists — starved for exits after what has been a prolonged drought in public offerings — Thursday felt like rain after a years-long dry season.

Benchmark, which co-led Cerebras's Series A funding round back in 2016 when the company was little more than an audacious idea, is now sitting on shares worth $5.5 billion at Thursday's close. Foundation Capital, another cornerstone investor in that same early round, holds a stake valued at $4.8 billion.

"It's a big outcome," said Eric Vishria, the Benchmark partner who championed his firm's original Cerebras investment and still occupies a board seat. "Whether it's $100 billion or $50 billion — it's very rare to have companies go public at all when you're an early-stage venture investor. It's very rare to have any company go public at any valuation."

The context sharpens the significance. While total US venture-backed exit value more than doubled last year to $217.1 billion, that figure still represents less than one-third of the record $790.7 billion in exits reached in 2021, according to the National Venture Capital Association's annual yearbook.

OpenAI Founders Among the Early Winners

The Cerebras investor list reads like a who's-who of the AI era's founding generation. OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were among the company's early backers — as was Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Altman's shares are now worth $27.8 million; Brockman's stake has reached $24.2 million — and neither has had to wait for their own company's IPO to see returns.

The Cerebras-OpenAI relationship runs deeper than shared investors. In early 2026, the two companies struck a $20 billion multi-year agreement for computing capacity and related services — a deal that anchors Cerebras firmly in the supply chain powering the world's most prominent AI systems.

The Chip at the Center of It All

What Cerebras sells is not merely faster hardware — it is a reimagining of what AI chips can be. The company's flagship Wafer Scale Engine 3 is engineered for inference, the computationally intensive process by which AI models generate responses in real time for end users. Cerebras claims its WSE-3 chips outrun Nvidia's dominant GPUs on inference tasks — a bold assertion in a market where Nvidia has long held near-monopoly authority.

Beyond chips, Cerebras offers a full-stack AI infrastructure portfolio encompassing data centers and a proprietary cloud platform, positioning it as an end-to-end competitor in the infrastructure layer that the AI economy runs on.

Feldman previously co-founded and led SeaMicro, a microserver company acquired by AMD in 2012 for approximately $334 million — a respectable exit that now looks modest compared to what Thursday delivered. His current Cerebras stake of roughly 10.3 million shares represents about 5.5% of the company; Lie holds close to 3%.

The Horizon: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic

As staggering as the Cerebras IPO appears by conventional measures, it may soon be dwarfed by what is coming. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — each hovering at or near trillion-dollar private market valuations — are all reportedly advancing toward public offerings of their own, buoyed by insatiable global demand for AI models, services, and the infrastructure that sustains them.

"It's been a long, very interesting road — lots of technology and innovation and many white-knuckle moments," said Steve Vassallo, a Foundation Capital partner and Cerebras board member. "Today is yet another example of that."

For now, the road has arrived at a $100 billion destination. And if the AI boom continues to accelerate at its current pace, Thursday's record may not hold that title for long.