Cerebras revenue jumps, but weak margins spook investors

Cerebras posted a sharp revenue jump in its first earnings report as a public company, but the market fixated on a more troubling figure: the company now expects full-year gross margins of just 38% to 41%. That gap between fast-growing sales and thin profitability sent the stock lower and sharpened doubts about whether AI-chip hype can outrun the economics of building and deploying giant inference systems.

For the quarter ended March 31, 2026, Cerebras said revenue rose 94% to $193.4 million from $99.5 million a year earlier. Core revenue reached $191.3 million, up 92% from the same period last year, and adjusted net loss narrowed to $2.5 million. Cloud and other services revenue climbed to $82.8 million from $29.8 million, underscoring how much of the company’s expansion is coming from services tied to its hardware rather than chips alone.

Even with that growth, investors focused on the margin math. Cerebras said first-quarter core gross margin was 47%, but it guided second-quarter core gross margin to 36% to 38% and full-year 2026 gross margin to 38% to 41%. Shares fell about 8% in extended trading as the company delivered second-quarter sales guidance of $194 million and full-year revenue guidance of $855 million to $865 million. The outlook signaled that scaling demand will require more infrastructure spending before the business can produce the kind of profitability the market expects from leading AI hardware names.

The company’s first public report also showed how concentrated and capital-intensive its opportunity has become. Cerebras raised $5.55 billion in its initial public offering last month, and a large share of its growth is tied to OpenAI through a multi-year agreement to deploy 750 megawatts of Cerebras chips. Company-linked reporting has described that deal as worth more than $20 billion. That scale gives Cerebras a major position in AI infrastructure, but it also puts customer concentration and manufacturing complexity under a brighter spotlight.

Chief Financial Officer Bob Komin said Cerebras is temporarily renting back its own systems from an existing customer while it builds more data-center capacity, a move that helps meet demand but weighs on margins. Chief Executive Andrew Feldman said the company is in early discussions for data centers in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Singapore, India and Indonesia, pointing to an aggressive global buildout. For AI-chip investors, the message from Cerebras was clear: revenue is arriving fast, but the test now is whether the company can turn that demand into scalable profits.