Sam Altman made tens of millions of dollars on OpenAI partner's IPO

The head of OpenAI made a big paper profit after Cerebras, the AI chip maker with which OpenAI is already linked in a multibillion-dollar deal, went public. On Ma. 14, the specialized chip maker had its biggest IPO so far this year.

At an offering price of $185 per paper, trading opened at $350. This is personally important for Altman: court documents from his legal battle with Elon Musk showed that the OpenAI chief had 89,373 shares of Cerebras. At the end of 2025, that stake was valued at $3.2 million, and after the start of trading, according to Business Insider calculations, could be worth about $30 million.

Altman made his first investment in Cerebras back in 2017 - long before the launch of ChatGPT and the boom in investment in AI computing. Cerebras makes chips specifically designed for the task of inferencing - issuing responses by a neural network. Altman himself, in a promo video for the IPO, called Cerebras chips "the world's best offering for high-speed inferencing to date," The Information reported.

In its offering prospectus, Cerebras acknowledged that its first two generations in 2020 and 2022 didn't attract much attention, then, as the startup's management noted, "change came with ChatGPT," and a few years later, "artificial intelligence became smart enough to be of value, people started using AI everywhere, and demand for inferencing skyrocketed."

In January 2026, OpenAI and Cerebras announced a partnership worth more than $10 billion: OpenAI gave the chip developer a $1 billion loan and received the right to purchase hardware until 2030. The ChatGPT developer also received warrants for millions of shares, becoming a direct beneficiary of the partner's successful listing on the stock exchange.

Cerebras declined to comment on the matter. OpenAI did not respond to Business Insider's requests.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor