Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The structural shift, not the IPO mechanics Cerebras Systems went public on 14 May 2026, closing its first trading day at a fully diluted valuation of roughly $56 billion. The headline is easy to write and easy to misread. The actual story is not that a niche AI hardware company finally listed; it is what the company committed to in the weeks before pricing — a multi-year deal with OpenAI to deliver up to 750 megawatts of inference capacity over three years on Cerebras's wafer-scale engines. That single anchor customer is what the public-market valuation is really pricing. And that contract is the visible edge of something larger: inference is splitting away from training as a separate market, with separate buyers, separate economics and increasingly separate silicon. Nvidia's GPUs still…
