Sam Altman got a whole lot richer Thursday morning.
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The OpenAI CEO has a multimillion-dollar stake in the chipmaker Cerebras, which kicked off the largest initial public offering of the year on Thursday. The company’s stock opened at $350 a share, far above the $185 pricing. For Altman, who staked a piece of Cerebras long before it hit the public markets, that means a windfall.
An exhibit from Altman’s ongoing trial against Elon Musk showed that he held 89,373 shares of Cerebras, worth $3.2 million at the end of last year. That’s now multiplied. Cerebras’ stock price was volatile on Thursday, though based on some back-of-the-napkin math, Altman’s holding could be worth around $30 million.
Altman first snagged an interest in Cerebras in February 2017, the court document showed, long before ChatGPT’s release and a frenzy of investment in AI computing channeled interest toward Cerebras. The company, led by CEO Andrew Feldman, makes platter-sized wafer chips purpose-built for AI.
In its IPO prospectus, Cerebras’ leaders recalled that its first two generations of technology, in 2020 and 2022, didn’t attract much attention. Then, “change arrived with ChatGPT,” they wrote, and a few years later, “AI was smart enough to be valuable, and people were using AI everywhere. Inference usage exploded.”
The chipmaker has been focusing on inference, the process by which AI models take inputs and spit back outputs for chatbot users and coding customers. Altman called Cerebras’ chips “the best high-speed inference offering in the world right now” in a pitch video for the IPO, The Information reported.
OpenAI and Cerebras have become deeply intertwined. In January, the companies announced a deal worth north of $10 billion. They said OpenAI will use Cerebras’ chips, and they’ll co-design technology moving forward. OpenAI also gave Cerebras a $1 billion loan and has the option to buy additional batches of chips through 2030.
OpenAI also received warrants for millions of shares once Cerebras went public — so both Altman and his company will enjoy the benefits of Thursday morning’s rally.
Cerebras declined to comment. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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