Shares of Cerebras Systems fell roughly 14% Thursday, a day after the AI chipmaker's second-quarter revenue fell short of Wall Street's expectations, even as the company raised its full-year guidance. The stock had spiked as much as 17% lower in after-hours trading immediately following Wednesday's earnings release before paring some of the decline.
Cerebras reported GAAP revenue of $180.1 million for the quarter, well below the roughly $194 million analysts polled by LSEG had projected, and a decline from the year-earlier period. The headline number obscured a sharper divide underneath: core revenue, which strips out lower-margin data-center pass-through sales, rose 103% year over year to $209.9 million, and GAAP cloud revenue climbed 281% to $126 million as customers increasingly rent time on Cerebras systems rather than buy hardware outright. The company posted a GAAP net loss of $450.5 million, driven largely by $386.6 million in stock-based compensation tied to its May initial public offering; on an adjusted basis, which strips out that charge, Cerebras actually posted a narrower loss than Wall Street expected.
Guidance raised despite the miss
Cerebras lifted its full-year core revenue outlook to a range of $880 million to $890 million, up from $855 million to $865 million previously, and guided to $214 million to $216 million in core revenue for the current quarter. Chief Executive Andrew Feldman said demand for the company's wafer-scale AI chips, which are designed to run inference workloads far faster than conventional GPU-based systems, remains "through the roof," while Chief Financial Officer Bob Komin told investors the company expects to more than triple revenue in 2027. The company also disclosed remaining performance obligations — contracted future revenue not yet recognized — of $25.4 billion, a backlog figure that points to large multi-year cloud and data-center commitments still working their way onto the income statement.
Speed changes what AI can do. It makes AI more useful, more productive, and opens entirely new markets.
Andrew Feldman, chief executive, Cerebras Systems
The stock's reaction reflects the volatile debut Cerebras has had since going public in May, when shares priced above their expected range and then surged 68% on their first day of trading. Even after Thursday's drop, the stock remained well above its $185 IPO price, having traded above $260 earlier in the week. Some analysts framed the sell-off as an overreaction to a single noisy quarter set against a business that is still scaling rapidly: Morgan Stanley analysts pointed to the accelerating core and cloud growth, improved margins and the raised outlook as reasons the pullback could represent a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign.
The report lands amid intensifying competition in AI infrastructure, where Cerebras positions itself as a faster alternative to Nvidia's dominant GPU platform for running trained models rather than training them. A revenue miss at any single AI-infrastructure company tends to reverberate through the sector given how closely investors are scrutinizing whether the massive capital spending on AI data centers is translating into matching revenue growth for the chipmakers supplying them.
