Cerebras just had the biggest US tech IPO since Snowflake. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are next.

Cerebras Systems closed its first day on the Nasdaq at $311.07, up 68% from its $185 IPO price, giving the wafer-scale chip company a market capitalisation of approximately $95 billion. The offering raised $5.55 billion, making it the largest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s $3.8 billion debut in 2020. CEO Andrew Feldman rang the bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite holding the company’s dinner-plate-sized Wafer Scale Engine 3 chip. By the close, the two co-founders, Feldman and hardware chief Sean Lie, were billionaires.

The debut is a validation of investor appetite for pure-play AI hardware, a category that has been almost entirely inaccessible to public market investors. CoreWeave, which went public in March 2025 and is now valued at over $58 billion, was the closest prior data point, but it sells cloud infrastructure rather than silicon. Cerebras is the first dedicated AI chip company to list since the generative AI boom began, and its opening-day performance suggests that public market demand for AI exposure is at least as aggressive as the private market has been pricing it.

But the Cerebras IPO also exposed a problem for the rest of the IPO pipeline. As Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures, told CNBC: “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.” He was referring to SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, which are each valued near or above $1 trillion on the private market and are all in some stage of IPO preparation.

SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI in February at a $1.25 trillion valuation, is expected to disclose its IPO prospectus as soon as next week. The Wall Street Journal reported the company is targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, which would make it the largest IPO in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion in 2019. SpaceX has assembled an underwriting syndicate of at least 21 banks, with a global roadshow expected to begin in early June and a listing date reportedly targeted for 12 June.

OpenAI is preparing to go public in Q4 2026, targeting a valuation of approximately $852 billion after closing a $122 billion funding round in March. CFO Sarah Friar has described the IPO as a “moment to build trust” but has also cautioned that the company is not yet ready to be public. The legal dispute with Musk, ongoing product strategy revisions, and a CRO who has publicly accused Anthropic of overstating its revenue by $8 billion through gross accounting, add complexity to a listing that will be the most closely scrutinised tech offering of the decade.

Anthropic has attracted investor offers at approximately $800 billion, more than doubling the $380 billion at which it closed a $30 billion funding round just two months earlier. The company is in early talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley about a listing as early as October. Its annualised revenue surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by early April 2026, driven largely by enterprise adoption of Claude Code.

The combined fundraising demand from all three, projected to exceed $150 billion, raises genuine questions about market liquidity. Institutional investors will need to allocate capital at a scale that has no precedent in IPO history. Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark, framed Cerebras as the signal the market needed: “It’s going to encourage people to say, ‘Hey, jump in, the water’s warm.‘” But the warm water is about to receive three entrants whose combined mass could displace everything around them.

The IPO drought that preceded this moment was severe. There were only 31 tech IPOs in 2025, down from 121 four years earlier. Total US venture-backed exit value more than doubled last year to $217.1 billion, but that figure is less than one-third of the 2021 peak of $790.7 billion. Many of the companies in the pre-IPO pipeline, Databricks at $134 billion, Discord, Canva, were created before ChatGPT and are now reckoning with the fact that AI is the only narrative generating institutional excitement.

Cerebras benefited from that dynamic directly. The company’s revenue went from $24.6 million in 2022 to $510 million in 2025, swinging from a $481.6 million net loss to $88 million in net income. The transformative deal was a $20 billion multi-year contract with OpenAI for inference computing capacity, signed in January, which resolved the customer concentration problem that had stalled an earlier IPO attempt in 2024. Before OpenAI, Cerebras was overwhelmingly dependent on G42, the Abu Dhabi AI conglomerate, which accounted for 85% of 2024 revenue and triggered a CFIUS review that forced the company to restructure G42’s stake into non-voting shares.

The early venture investors are seeing extraordinary returns. Benchmark, which co-led Cerebras’ Series A in 2016, holds shares worth $5.5 billion at Thursday’s close. Foundation Capital’s stake is valued at $4.8 billion. Eclipse owns $2.5 billion. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who were early personal investors, hold stakes now worth $27.8 million and $24.2 million respectively. For a venture capital industry that has been struggling with a multi-year exit drought, Cerebras is a tangible reminder that the returns still exist, they just require a decade of patience and a market that wants what you are selling.

What Cerebras cannot do is tell the market that the IPO window is open for everyone. It can tell the market that the window is open for AI. The question for the rest of the pipeline, the enterprise software companies, the fintech platforms, the consumer apps, is whether enough institutional capital remains after SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic absorb their $150 billion, or whether the AI supercycle has created a two-tier IPO market in which the only companies that can go public at attractive valuations are the ones building the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.