Amazon gets boost from 72% pop in AI company Astera Labs’ IPO

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy loves to talk about how much his company is benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom. On Wednesday, Amazon got an AI boost in a different way.

Shares of Astera Labs, which sells data center connectivity chips to cloud and AI infrastructure companies, soared 72% in their Nasdaq debut, closing at $62.03. That gives Astera a market cap of close to $9.5 billion.

Astera’s IPO plays into Wall Street’s thirst for all things AI. Founded in 2017 by former Texas Instruments executives, Astera counts Nvidia, AMD, and Intel among its customers. It’s also selling heavily to Amazon.

The company got a major vote of confidence in 2022, when it struck a deal with Amazon that gave the tech giant warrants allowing it to buy up to 1.5 million shares of Astera’s stock at $20.34 apiece. The following year, the agreement was amended, giving Amazon a warrant to buy more than 830,000 additional shares. As of the end of last year, Amazon controlled 232,608 shares, according to a securities filing.

Based on Wednesday’s closing price, Amazon’s shares and warrants are worth a total of almost $144 million.

But in order for Amazon to vest the rest of its shares and fully benefit from the price pop, it must purchase up to $650 million worth of Astera’s products in the coming years, according to the agreement. That’s a lot of money for Astera, which recorded total sales last year of $115.8 million, up from $79.9 million in 2022.

The three types of products Amazon has agreed to buy are are all designed to address “critical bottlenecks in AI infrastructure,” according to Astera’s IPO prospectus.

Astera is joining the public markets as investors eagerly await social media company Reddit’s planned New York Stock Exchange debut Thursday. The tech IPO market has been largely dormant since late 2021, with Arm Holdings, Instacart and Klaviyo among the very few that have held offerings over that stretch.

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