OpenAI's chip partner Cerebras hit Wall Street, and that means a big payday for Sam Altman

Sam Altman experienced a significant financial boost on Thursday as the chip manufacturer Cerebras made its debut on Wall Street with the largest initial public offering of the year. The stock opened at an impressive $350 per share, far exceeding its initial pricing of $185, leading to a potential windfall for the OpenAI CEO. Documents from Altman's ongoing legal proceedings against Elon Musk revealed that he owned 89,373 shares of Cerebras, valued at approximately $3.2 million by the end of last year. Following the IPO's launch, this value has dramatically increased, with rough estimates suggesting Altman's holdings could now be worth around $30 million. Altman's investment in Cerebras dates back to February 2017, well before the rise of ChatGPT and the surge in investments directed towards AI technologies. The company, led by CEO Andrew Feldman, specializes in producing large wafer-scale chips designed specifically for artificial intelligence applications. In their IPO prospectus, Cerebras executives noted that their earlier technologies from 2020 and 2022 initially went unnoticed until the advent of ChatGPT sparked widespread interest and usage of AI. The firm has strategically concentrated on inference, the mechanism through which AI models process inputs to generate outputs for various applications, including chatbots and programming tools. Altman described Cerebras' chips as "the best high-speed inference offering in the world right now" in a promotional video for the IPO. The relationship between OpenAI and Cerebras has deepened significantly, with a major deal announced earlier this year valued at over $10 billion. This agreement entails OpenAI utilizing Cerebras' chips and collaborating on technology development. Furthermore, OpenAI provided Cerebras with a $1 billion loan and secured options to purchase additional chips until 2030, along with warrants for shares once the company went public. As a result, both Altman and OpenAI stand to gain substantially from the positive market response to Cerebras' IPO. Cerebras has not issued a comment regarding the IPO, and OpenAI did not respond to inquiries from Business Insider.