MW Cerebras delivers its first earnings report - but it's not enough to lift the stock
By Britney Nguyen
Despite upbeat revenue figures, Cerebras's stock was falling in after-hours trading
Cerebras posted its first-ever earnings report Tuesday.
Cerebras Systems' stock bucked the chip-sector selloff in Tuesday's regular session - but it was getting punished in after-hours trading, despite better-than-expected results and guidance in the AI-chip maker's first earnings report as a public company.
Cerebras (CBRS), which held its initial public offering in May, posted first-quarter core revenue of $191.3 million, up 92% from a year ago and ahead of the FactSet analyst consensus for $181.2 million. The company uses "core financial results," which it says "exclude the impact of amortization of customer warrants, data-center pass-through revenues and costs," among other items.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman noted in a statement that the company has seen "significant momentum with pioneering customers" that include OpenAI and Amazon Web Services (AMZN), thanks to its technology that "delivers the fastest AI in the world."
The chip maker - which focuses on inference, or the process of running artificial-intelligence models - is now serving OpenAI's GPT-5.4 that was released in early March, Feldman told MarketWatch.
Cerebras uses an entire wafer as one chip through a technique called wafer-scale integration, instead of the usual process which splits a wafer into several individual die. The chip maker said its wafer-scale engine is 58 times larger than Nvidia's (NVDA) B200 chip and includes on-chip static random-access memory, which is faster than the dynamic random-access memory used by other companies.
Cerebras announced a multiyear agreement with OpenAI in January for the ChatGPT maker to deploy 750 megawatts of AI inference compute capacity. The deal is valued at more than $20 billion, according to the chip company. OpenAI also has a warrant to purchase up to 33.4 million shares of Cerebras's common stock.
The company also has an agreement with AWS to deploy its wafer-sized chips in the hyperscaler's data centers.
Cerebras reported a core gross margin of 47% and a core operating loss of $3.5 million for the first quarter. The company's core net loss was $2.5 million.
Management's guidance for second-quarter core revenue calls for $194 million, above the $178 million consensus analyst view.
Still, Cerebras's stock fell more than 9% in after-hours trading following the report.
How quickly the chip maker can deploy compute capacity will be "the key driver of revenue and gross-margin upside," Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a report ahead of the earnings release - noting expectations for Cerebras to bring 250 megawatts of compute online by the middle of next year.
Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson took a similar view that there is "almost zero demand risk" for Cerebras, while expectations going forward "will likely be solely dictated by the company's ability to execute."
Feldman told MarketWatch that the company has been able to "sidestep some of the constraints that are in the market" at the moment, including supply for memory and advanced chip packaging.
Demand for DRAM has skyrocketed amid the AI buildout, especially as chip makers such as Nvidia seek high-bandwidth memory, which involves stacking multiple DRAM die.
Cerebras's use of SRAM makes that "less an issue" for the company, Bryson had pointed out in his Monday note.
In the long term, Moore said focus will be on whether its wafer-scale engine can be "a durable competitive advantage" to other AI-chip offerings by providing customers better economics as they scale AI systems.
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-Britney Nguyen
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June 23, 2026 17:43 ET (21:43 GMT)
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