Cerebras stock falls after blockbuster IPO debut — here’s what’s happening

Cerebras Systems‘ shares were volatile in early trading Friday after the company completed the largest IPO by a U.S. tech firm in years.

The semiconductor firm initially sold shares at $185 as it started trading on the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange, before closing at $331.07 per share. Cerebras’ stock soared 68% by the closing bell, giving it a market cap of about $95 billion.

The firm sold 30 million shares on Thursday, raising $5.55 billion, which is the largest IPO for a tech firm since Uber’s debut in 2019.

Cerebras initially rose around 6% in premarket trading Friday, before paring gains to last trade down 2.6%.

Cerebras is an AI hardware company that sells extremely large computer chips and AI systems designed to train and run AI models faster than traditional GPUs. While the company sells AI infrastructure, its specialty is inference, where models respond and interact directly with users.

Its flagship product is the Wafer Scale Engine 3, which is a massive processor built from an entire silicon wafer rather than many smaller chips. Cerebras claims its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.

Some analysts are sceptical about the company’s long-term viability and how applicable its wafer-scale AI technology is. Analysts from investment banking group Davidson on Wednesday described the product as “niche-y.”

“The Cerebras IPO may be well received, but after reading the S1 and watching the roadshow, we wouldn’t get too excited,” the Davidson analysts said ahead of the company’s market debut.

They added that while the technology is impressive, the Wafer is still in “early stages of maturity” and while it may deliver higher speed in some applications, it’s less flexible than existing AI chip systems.

The IPO debut made the company’s top executives billionaires, with CEO Andrew Feldman and CTO Sean Lie owning stakes worth $3.2 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.

In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Feldman said the company had become mature enough to “access the public markets,” and “we have tremendous opportunities for growth, and this was the right way to fund our growth.”