Cerebras raised its outlook for the full year on continued demand for its cloud services, even as direct sales of its artificial-intelligence chips fell in the third quarter.

The semiconductor company said it now expects core revenue of between $940 million and $960 million for the year, compared with previous guidance for $880 million to $890 million. The company also projected core gross margins between 42% and 44%, a boost of one percentage point.

Analysts polled by FactSet are currently expecting full-year core revenue of $887.5 million with a 42% gross margin.

Shares of Cerebras jumped 15% to $112.80 in after-hours trading following the results.

Cerebras, which sells both chips and cloud computing capacity, also expects revenue to triple in 2027, as demand for AI compute remains strong despite intensifying investor worries around the AI buildout.

"The demand for fast inference, which is what we specialize in, is enormous," Chief Executive Andrew Feldman said in an interview, referring to the process of AI models generating outputs. "The business is cooking with gas."

The company on Thursday said it signed Microsoft as a new customer, although financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed. The Microsoft deal adds to Cerebras's existing partnerships with Oracle and OpenAI.

Cerebras reported a third-quarter loss of $161.2 million, or 67 cents a share, in the quarter ended Sept. 30. That compares with a loss of $22.2 million, or 41 cents a share, a year earlier.

Core revenue, an adjusted metric that accounts for data-center pass-through revenue and customer equity warrants, surged 70% to $230.9 million. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting $214.7 million in core revenue. Revenue on a non-adjusted basis grew 55% to $210.8 million.

The core revenue growth included a 272% increase in core revenue from cloud and other services to $144.9 million.

Core hardware revenue, which includes direct sales of Cerebras's AI inference chips, fell to $86 million from $96.8 million.

"Hardware sales are lumpy," Feldman said of the decline, adding that the company's once-nascent cloud business has accelerated over the past year. He said the results aren't indicative of a growing focus on the cloud business and that the company doesn't have a set preference for selling hardware or cloud capacity.

Cerebras reported a core gross margin of 41%, beating analyst expectations for a roughly 39.2% margin. The core operating margin was negative 14%.

For the current fourth quarter, the company guided for core revenue between $310 million and $330 million, with core gross margin between 47% and 49%. Analysts are expecting $274.9 million in core revenue with a 42% core gross margin.