Cerebras revenue jumps, but margin outlook sends shares lower

Cerebras Systems' first quarterly report as a public company sent shares down about 10% in extended trading. Revenue climbed to $193.4 million from $99.5 million a year earlier, but the company forecast full-year adjusted gross margins of 38% to 41%, below the 47% it posted in the first quarter and far short of Nvidia’s mid-70% range and AMD’s mid-50% range.

The adjusted net loss narrowed to $2.5 million, and second-quarter adjusted sales of $194 million came in above analyst estimates. Even so, management warned that margins would stay under pressure because the company is temporarily renting back its own systems from an existing customer while it adds more data-center capacity. Chief financial officer Bob Komin said the extra cost of third-party capacity would temporarily depress margins.

Much of Cerebras' growth has come from inference, the stage of AI work where systems answer user queries, a business that depends on both chips and the infrastructure to run them. Cerebras announced a multi-year OpenAI deal valued at more than $20 billion, with OpenAI planning to deploy 750 megawatts of Cerebras’ high-speed inference compute over the next several years. Cerebras began a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services to broaden access to fast inference and co-launched Codex-Spark, a model optimized for interactive work that can deliver more than 1,000 tokens per second.

Cerebras closed its initial public offering on May 15, 2026, selling 34.5 million shares at $185 each after earlier plans were delayed amid scrutiny over its Abu Dhabi ties. Founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie and Jean-Philippe Fricker, Cerebras first launched its WSE-1 wafer-scale chip and CS-1 system in 2019, giving it a longer development cycle than many newer AI hardware entrants.

Andrew Feldman said the company was in early discussions on data centers in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Singapore, India and Indonesia.