Cerebras bets on new chip to revive post-IPO stock performance

Cerebras Systems went public on May 13, 2026, at $185 per share, and for about 24 hours, everything looked incredible. Shares surged 68% on debut day, closing around $311. Then reality set in. By August 2026, the stock had cratered more than 50% from its highs, at times trading below the IPO price. Now the company is leaning hard into its next-generation wafer-scale chip as the cure for what ails its stock chart, arguing that its specialized silicon will outpace traditional GPUs as AI agents become the dominant computing workload. The chip that’s bigger than your face The company’s Wafer-Scale Engine 3, or WSE-3, measures 46,225 square millimeters. The WSE-3 packs 4 trillion transistors and delivers 125 petaflops of AI computing power. Cerebras claims the chip offers thousands of times greater memory bandwidth than leading GPUs, which translates to 10x to 15x faster token generation for AI inference tasks. The company, founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, employs roughly 708 people and focuses exclusively on AI training and inference hardware. It has landed partnerships with OpenAI and AWS to deploy its inference capabilities. The stock tells a different story Cerebras raised approxi...