NEW YORK – Serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Feldman, who literally grew up on the campus of Stanford University, was already involved in selling three companies and taking another public. But none of that compares with the debut of his AI chip manufacturer on May 14.
Shares of Cerebras Systems, a company he co-founded in 2015, soared about 68 per cent in Nasdaq trading in New York. It’s the year’s biggest initial public offering and gives the company a market value of roughly US$67 billion (S$85.5 billion).
That put Mr Feldman’s stake at US$3.2 billion (S$4.1 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing his fortune for the first time. Co-founder Sean Lie’s holding, meanwhile, is worth US$1.6 billion.
“Pretty good day, huh?” Mr Feldman, 56, the company’s chief executive officer, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “It’s one of the biggest tech IPOs in history, and it’s the biggest semi IPO in history. We couldn’t be more proud.”
AI chipmakers have been among the hottest stocks since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, with Nvidia. the clear market leader. The company has soared to become the world’s largest by market value, while making its co-founder, Jensen Huang, the seventh-richest person globally with a US$186.7 billion fortune.
Cerebras is differentiating itself from incumbents like Nvidia through its development of a much larger chip that promises faster performance than those that have so far been the backbone of AI development. Engineering constraints have long limited chipmakers’ pursuit of size: As chips gets physically larger, the energy needed to power them can also potentially damage them.
Cereberas’ chips – about the size of a sheet of printer paper – have proven popular for inference tasks, or the process of running AI models as opposed to training them.
“There’s just an extraordinary demand right now for fast inference,” Mr Feldman said in the BTV interview. “As AI becomes useful, everybody wants it to become fast. Nobody wants to wait.”
Several of Cerebras’ early products didn’t get traction, but the release of ChatGPT changed its fortunes as the demand for AI chips grew. OpenAI released its first model running on Cerebras chips in February after announcing a long-term partnership to buy more than 750 megawatts of its computing power through 2028, valued at about US$20 billion.
Amazon.com also announced in March that it would begin offering Cerebras chips in its AWS data centers later in 2026. A “significant majority” of the company’s revenue in 2025 came from customers in the United Arab Emirates, according to a filing. BLOOMBERG
