A few years ago, the tech IPO market basically died. Inflation spiked, rates climbed, and buyers stopped paying for growth.
Then Cerebras Systems opened on Thursday.
The AI chipmaker popped almost 70% in its first day and closed near a $95 billion market cap. Two more days like that and Cerebras joins Alibaba and Facebook in a club of two.
Cerebras builds chips designed to compete with Nvidia. The company says its Wafer Scale Engine 3 chips run faster on AI tasks than the GPUs powering most of the industry.
Wall Street wanted in.
Cerebras had real customer wins to point to. A $20 billion deal with OpenAI, and a deal with Amazon Web Services.
The firm hit the market in the middle of a chip boom that has also lifted Intel, AMD, and Micron.
It became the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Uber went public in 2019 - the largest IPO of any kind this year.
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Late-stage tech firms have been stuck on the sidelines since early 2022. Cerebras would seem to be the green light. It is not.
Three names lead the next wave of IPOs: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Each is valued at or near $1 trillion.
SpaceX could file its public paperwork as soon as next week, while OpenAI and Anthropic are eyeing the back half of the year.
In February, Elon Musk merged SpaceX with his AI firm xAI in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion. That alone puts SpaceX in the top 10 most valuable U.S. tech firms on day one.
"Nobody wants to be caught in the SpaceX blast radius," Renos Savvides of Neuberger Berman told CNBC.
A software firm trying to IPO the same week as a $1.25 trillion rocket maker has a problem: nobody is listening.
Cerebras was the kind of firm the market could not ignore. It had AI, real customers, and the chip story all in one place.
That is not most of the IPO pipeline.
Many of those firms were founded before ChatGPT. A lot are software-as-a-service - SaaS - the same group Wall Street worries AI agents will replace.
The only story buyers want right now is AI, and not all of those firms have it.
CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure firm that went public in March of last year, is now worth more than $58 billion. Cerebras was the next big AI win for the market.
Lise Buyer of IPO advisory firm Class V Group says late-stage startups are in "pragmatic preparation" mode - watching for signals that the market is open.
Sapphire Ventures partner Jai Das put it plainly: "It's a story of haves and have-nots."
Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark says other companies want to see someone else jump first. "Hey, jump in, the water's warm," he told CNBC.
The water is warm. Just not for everyone.
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