Cerebras Sinks Below Its $185 IPO Price as AI Trade Cracks
By @sharedot · · 6 pages
- Stock Market
- Cerebras
- AI Chips
- IPO
- Crwv
Cerebras fell to about $177.65 in October, dropping below its May IPO price even after swinging to profit, as the AI infrastructure selloff spread.
The reversal: from 108% pop to underwater
Five months after one of the most explosive tech debuts in years, Cerebras Systems is trading below the price it went public at. Startup Fortune reports that on October 1 the AI chipmaker's shares slipped to roughly $177.65, breaking beneath the $185 IPO price set on May 14.
The debut itself was spectacular: the stock opened at $350, a 108% jump, briefly touched $385 to trigger a circuit breaker, and handed the Sunnyvale company a market cap near $95 billion after a $5.55 billion raise — the biggest U.S. tech listing since 2019, per Reuters and the Financial Times as cited by Startup Fortune.
Why the drop is so surprising
The strange part is that the business has only improved since the debut. Startup Fortune notes Cerebras posted $510 million in 2025 revenue, up 76%, and flipped from a $481.6 million net loss to $87.9 million in net income, backed by a $10 billion compute deal with OpenAI running through 2028.
Q2 2026 revenue climbed 103% year over year to $209.9 million, and UBS kept a Buy rating while raising its target from $320 to $330. The stock is falling despite better fundamentals, not worse ones — a hallmark of a sector-wide conviction shift rather than company-specific trouble.
Lockup expiries and insider sales set the clock
Startup Fortune traces the October slide to supply, not demand: a lockup provision expired October 1, freeing roughly 13% of IPO shares to trade, with Form 144 notices covering about $84 million in planned sales filed the same day.
CTO Sean Lie filed to sell more than $153 million in stock, and CEO Andrew Feldman's earlier $5.92 million sale trimmed his stake by close to 28.5%.
A second, larger unlock covering another 17% of shares landed two days after Q2 earnings, and the timing of insider selling landed badly for a stock already on the defensive.
The AI trade is the real variable
The damage sits in a battered neighborhood: Startup Fortune reports CoreWeave has fallen more than 60% from its post-IPO highs, including a 16% drop on October 13 with 2031-32 bonds yielding near 15% against roughly $52 billion in debt and lease obligations, while Nvidia lost over $400 billion in market value in mid-October and Gartner forecasts 80% of neocloud providers could vanish by 2030.