Sam Altman got a whole lot richer Thursday morning.
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."
