The chipmaker Cerebras went public Thursday in what can only be called a blockbuster IPO. The initial public offering price for its stock was $185. That rose nearly 70% by the end of the day. The company’s stock dipped a bit Friday, but ended trading at $279.72 by the closing bell.Cerebras makes chips that power artificial intelligence, and it’s one of several AI-related firms expected to go public this year. The company is known for one particular kind of chip that’s about the size of a dinner plate — it’s different from most chips, which are tiny. Nina Turner, a research director at IDC, said this chip helps speed up the rate at which AI models can respond to questions. “The models that are used to run AI basically run on these chips and allow the thinking to occur faster,” she said.Cerebras’ customers include Open AI and Amazon Web Services. Turner said there is a definite market for the company’s chips, which is why investors have been scooping up its stock.“There's really a lot of investor appetite for companies with AI hardware, especially one that can potentially challenge Nvidia's place in the market,” she said.Which makes Cerebras kind of a get, said Lehigh University finance professor Donald Bowen.“It’s hard to invest in this space, because … there's limited places to invest your money,” he said. “Which is why there's such enormous demand.”Some investors are also worried there will be less demand for human labor in the future. So, Bowen said they’re buying stock in the companies that make AI as a kind of hedge. “So if you lose your job, but you're invested, and you own the company that's taking your jobs, you still get the benefits of the economic activity that's generated,” he said.The demand for Cerebras bodes well for other major AI or AI-adjacent companies expected to go public in the next year. That includes Anthropic, Open AI, and SpaceX, which have eye-popping valuations.“It's kind of unprecedented for important companies to have stayed private as long as they have … before tapping public capital markets,” said Jay Ritter, director of the IPO Initiative at the University of Florida.Ritter said a lot of these companies have been burning through their private investments, so now, they’re turning to the rest of us.