Cerebras IPO debuts at $95B valuation
A summary of the interesting content that I consumed this past week…
What I Read This Week: a summary of the content that I consumed this past week…
Caught My Eye…
1) Cerebras IPO debuts at $95B valuation
On May 14, Cerebras opened on the Nasdaq at $350 a share, peaked at $386, and closed at $311, valuing the AI chipmaker at ~$95 billion on day one. The company priced its IPO at $185 the night before, which was already a twice-upsized range, and raised $5.55 billion. It is the largest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s $3.8 billion debut in 2020. The stock ended the week at around $278.
Cerebras builds wafer-scale AI accelerators, a single chip the size of a dinner plate that competes with Nvidia GPUs on inference workloads. Cerebras’s CS-3 is ~21x faster and about a third the cost of Nvidia’s B200 for certain inference jobs. As a fabless chip designer, they are the chip layer, under the hardware category, in our AI stack.
OpenAI had signed a multi-year, 750 MW inference deal in January, and AWS followed in March with a binding term sheet to deploy Cerebras inside its own data centers. Consequently, when the investment banks opened the book-building process, institutional demand for the IPO shares was more than 20x oversubscribed, with buyers submitting limit orders to gauge the true market depth.
Trailing 2025 revenue was $510 million, up 76% from the year before, and the company swung to a reported profit after losing ~$482 million in 2024. It was one of the only profitable AI chip startups to go public. Interestingly, the profit comes from one unique transaction. In 2024, Cerebras agreed to sell preferred shares to G42, the Abu Dhabi AI giant, recording a $401 million accounting loss that year. Then in 2025, the G42 relationship came under US national security review, and the deal was restructured. This allowed Cerebras to remove the liability from its books and record a $363 million paper gain. Operations themselves lost $145.9 million in 2025, wider than the $101.4 million operating loss in 2024.
Two customers made up 86% of 2025 revenue: G42 at 24% and MBZUAI at 62%. The S-1 flags MBZUAI as a related party of G42.
OpenAI sits on multiple sides of the Cerebras cap table: it lent Cerebras $1 billion at 6% in exchange for 33 million near-free warrants now worth roughly $10 billion. OpenAI is also paying $20 billion for the 750 MW of inference capacity through 2028.
2) Anthropic raising $30B at $930B
On May 14, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic has agreed terms for a $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion pre-money valuation, with Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter each putting in at least $2 billion as co-leads. The post-money figure clears $930 billion, putting Anthropic second among private companies behind SpaceX (around $1 trillion in secondary trading) and ahead of OpenAI ($852 billion). Currently, it would also rank roughly 14th among all public companies on earth.
The valuation went from $183 billion in 2024, to $380 billion in February, to $930 billion in May. Annualized revenue is also going exponential.
In the same week, Anthropic updated its legal terms to warn investors that any pre-IPO shares offered through SPVs or tokenized platforms are “void.”
3) CPI hits 3.8% as Warsh takes the Fed
On May 12, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported April headline CPI at 3.8% year-over-year, the highest reading since May 2023. The energy index in April accounted for over 40% of the monthly all-items increase.
The next day, the Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the 17th Federal Reserve chair on a 54-45 vote, the closest vote for a Fed chair in the modern era. Jerome Powell will remain on the Board as governor, with two years left in his term.
The administration wants rate cuts, and Warsh has spoken for years about AI as a deflationary force while proposing a new Fed-Treasury Accord.
“We need a new Treasury-Fed accord, like we did in 1951 after another period where we built up our nation’s debt and we were stuck with a central bank that was working at cross purposes with the Treasury. That’s the state of things now. So if we have a new accord, then the Fed chair and the Treasury secretary can describe to markets plainly and with deliberation. This is our objective for the size of the Fed’s balance sheet.” - Kevin Warsh, Chair of the Federal Reserve
Warsh’s first FOMC is June 16–17. Markets will be watching the rate decision and the tone of the press conference for signals on how the new Fed leadership reads the current inflation data and how it plans to communicate with the Treasury and the administration going forward.
Learn With My Friends and Me…
Other Reading…
Inside Anthropic’s $100 Billion Al Compute Commitment (Invest Like The Best)
2028: Two Scenarios for Global AI Leadership (Anthropic)
The Wu Tapes (Colossus)
On X…
Inflation may hit double digits in 2 years. My bogey is 18% inflation. The energy shock in the Middle East is very significant.
Hey Chamath - hope you get a chance to read this. Thank you for the All-In podcast. Growing up, I was always searching for people to look up to, but the versions of success presented in books, TV, and the news always felt too polished and unrealistic. Instead of helping, they gave me a distorted view of how the world actually works.
Listening to you across different podcasts and hearing you speak so candidly and authentically has been genuinely inspiring. The fact that you’re unapologetically yourself is something I really admire. I’d love to know - who are the people you look up to in your own life?