{"text":[[{"start":11.2,"text":"Shares in chipmaker Cerebras Systems more than doubled as it began trading after raising $5.5bn from its initial public offering, in the latest sign of overwhelming investor demand for AI and semiconductor stocks. "}],[{"start":26.85,"text":"Cerebras’ alliances with OpenAI and Amazon helped it launch the biggest IPO of the year, despite the Silicon Valley company being little known outside the tech industry and written off by many as an also-ran rival to Nvidia only a few years ago."}],[{"start":42.150000000000006,"text":"Wall Street’s fevered response to the IPO will only intensify investors’ anticipation for the debuts of OpenAI and Anthropic, which could follow Elon Musk’s SpaceX into the public markets as soon as this year. "}],[{"start":56.550000000000004,"text":"Strong demand for Cerebras’ stock led bankers to raise the expected offering price for the shares several times, with the company pricing its IPO at $185 per share on Wednesday evening. It had targeted a raising of $4.8bn earlier this week."}],[{"start":74.05000000000001,"text":"The shares shot as high as $385 immediately after its debut on Thursday afternoon before trading was briefly halted because of volatility. It closed 68 per cent higher for the day at $311. "}],[{"start":88.05000000000001,"text":"Cerebras’ market capitalisation of almost $70bn puts it on a similar level as General Motors and Warner Bros Discovery, as well as NXP, a crucial chip supplier to Apple, Samsung and the automotive industry. "}],[{"start":101.50000000000001,"text":"Cerebras, which first filed paperwork to list almost two years ago, reported a $146mn operating loss on sales of $510mn in 2025, with revenue up 76 per cent year on year. Less than a year ago, it was valued at $8.1bn in a private financing."}],[{"start":121.05000000000001,"text":"The IPO coincided with a soaring chip stock rally, as investors flock to the infrastructure powering the AI boom. Both Nvidia, the leading AI chipmaker, and Broadcom, an important AI chip supplier to Google, hit new all-time highs on Thursday, valuing them at $5.7tn and $2.1tn, respectively."}],[{"start":142.70000000000002,"text":"Demand for computing power has quickly accelerated with the arrival of AI tools such as Claude Code. These systems require more processing power to carry out the “inference” involved in responding to queries, which Cerebras’ hardware is specialised for. "}],[{"start":158.35000000000002,"text":"Andrew Feldman, Cerebras’ co-founder and chief executive, set out to build a chip for the AI market more than a decade ago, and said it took years longer than he had originally expected to reach this point. "}],[{"start":171.75000000000003,"text":"“Building hardware is not an easy journey,” he told the FT on Thursday. “We did something nobody had ever done before in 2020, and nobody cared. We were ahead of the market.” "}],[{"start":181.20000000000002,"text":"In the past 18 months, Silicon Valley’s focus has shifted from training AI models to serving them to millions of customers. “AI moved from being a novelty to being useful,” Feldman said. “Suddenly the things that we were best at in the world, like speed, leapt to the forefront.” "}],[{"start":198.8,"text":"Cerebras’ technology uses entire sheets of silicon to make a chip the size of a dinner plate or 58 times larger than the Nvidia GPUs that dominate the AI market. "}],[{"start":210.15,"text":"The outsized design does away with the need to link many smaller chips together, which can slow responses to users’ AI queries."}],[{"start":218.70000000000002,"text":"Eric Vishria at Benchmark, an early investor in the company, said that when Cerebras pitched the idea, it was a “provocative but sensible” idea that had never been done successfully."}],[{"start":229.9,"text":"“There were several periods that were really dark. What they built was very hard to do. It was a tough market. It was very capital intensive. And they just kept on going,” he said. “We’re just scratching the surface about how much inference demand there’s going to be.” "}],[{"start":244.35,"text":"Cerebras recently struck a $20bn deal with OpenAI that will entail the AI start-up eventually deploying 750MW of Cerebras’ chips as well as co-designing hardware. Cerebras has also struck partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Meta and AI start-ups Mistral, Cognition and Windsurf."}],[{"start":265.05,"text":"Those deals should help to reduce its reliance on two large customers in the United Arab Emirates — computing group G42 and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence — which together accounted for 86 per cent of revenues last year."}],[{"start":280.8,"text":"Feldman played down the risk of Cerebras’ revenue concentration, noting that its partnership with AWS opens the door to thousands of corporate clients. "}],[{"start":290.35,"text":"Advisers on the deal included David Chen’s team at Morgan Stanley and bankers at Citi, UBS and Barclays. Lawyers included Tad Freese at Latham & Watkins and Alan Denenberg at Davis Polk & Wardwell."}],[{"start":304.8,"text":"Cerebras is one of many would-be challengers to Nvidia’s dominant share of the chip market, which still stands at about 80 per cent, according to analyst group IDC. It was founded around the same time as Groq, which struck a roughly $20bn deal in December with Nvidia to turn over its top talent and a licence to its intellectual property. "}],[{"start":332.05,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778815132_5283.mp3"}