G42-linked chipmaker Cerebras jumps in first day on Nasdaq

• Stock opens nearly 90% higher
• IPO raises $5.55 billion
• Strong UAE ties persist

Cerebras, an American chipmaker with extensive connections to the UAE, soared in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq as global demand for microchips continues to rise.

The stock opened nearly 90 percent higher on Thursday, trading at $350 per share from the set price of $185. It then rose to $385 before settling at $311 at market close.

Cerebras raised $5.55 billion late on Wednesday from 30 million shares via its initial public offering, the largest of the year so far ahead of what is expected to be Elon Musk’s SpaceX listing.

“Investors are willing to bet big on specialised chip architectures that promise to challenge Nvidia’s dominance even as the broader market frets over an AI spending bubble,” said Mohammed Soliman, director at McLarty Associates in Washington.

The company took a winding path to going public, partially as a result of its close ties with Emirati AI and cloud computing holding company, G42.

It withdrew a first filing in October 2025 after raising more than $1 billion and clearing a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) over G42’s $40 million investment in 2021 and long-term purchase commitments.

By December 2025, G42 had ostensibly divested that 1 percent ownership stake, according to news reports.

However, it remained one of Cerebras’ largest customers, accounting for 87 percent of revenue in the first half of 2024, according to the withdrawn prospectus.

That dependency on the UAE company fell to 24 percent of revenue last year, it said in April in its new IPO filing.

At the same time, Cerebras has vastly expanded its relationship with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), a state-backed institution in Abu Dhabi.

MBZUAI comprised 62 percent of revenues, and nearly 78 percent of receivables, in 2025.

Recent multi-billion-dollar agreements to supply compute power to OpenAI and Amazon Web Services are expected to absorb an increasingly larger slice of the company’s business going forward.

Further reading:

• Cerebras refiles for IPO but UAE ties remain
• Abu Dhabi-backed AI chipmaker Cerebras raises $1bn
• Cerebras IPO still in limbo over US fears on Abu Dhabi stake

G42 posted on the social platform X: “What began as a shared belief that wafer-scale chips could reshape the future of compute has grown into one of the most important AI infrastructure companies in the world.

“From Abu Dhabi to Silicon Valley, our collaboration has rested on a single ambition: to scale AI infrastructure for a world that demands it.”

Soliman called the IPO a “clear referendum on the AI supercycle”.

With an order backlog almost equivalent to its market value, Cerebras exemplifies how blue-chip hyperscalers “will pay almost any price for the specialised hardware needed to train ever-larger models”, he said.

The IPO put Cerebras’ overall valuation at nearly $50 billion, according to Bloomberg, more than five times the $8 billion it hit in September.

The company’s valuation surpassed $100 billion in trading on Thursday, before closing at about $86 billion.

Cerebras reported $510 million in 2025 revenue, an almost 76 percent annual increase.