Credit: Cerebras Cerebras shares rose about 17% in after-hours trading on Thursday. The AI chipmaker posted third-quarter results that beat analysts’ estimates, lifted its outlook for the year and added a new cloud customer. The company now expects core revenue of $940m to $960m this year, Reuters reported. In August it had forecast $880m to $890m.
Core revenue is Cerebras’ adjusted measure. It strips out stock-based pay and some data centre costs. It also adds back the value of share warrants given to customers. The results statement named the new customer only as “a top three hyperscaler”, with details due next year.
Chief executive Andrew Feldman told CNBC’s Jordan Novet that it is Microsoft, which signed in October. He expects revenue from the deal to start arriving in the first quarter of 2027. Cerebras already works with Amazon and with Oracle, which plans to offer Cerebras inference in Oracle’s cloud from 2027. A revenue beat and a wider loss Core revenue rose 70% to $230.9m in the three months to 30 September.
Analysts had expected $214.7m, according to LSEG data cited by CNBC. Revenue under standard accounting rules (GAAP) rose 55% to $210.8m. Cloud is now most of the business. Cloud and services revenue jumped 265% to $141.9m.
Hardware sales fell to $68.9m, from $96.8m a year earlier. On its adjusted measure, Cerebras made a profit of $29.8m. Analysts had expected a loss of $38.4m, Reuters reported. Under GAAP, the net loss widened to $161.2m from $22.2m a year earlier.
Stock-based pay of $155.1m caused most of the gap. “That progress energizes us to do even more as we push the limits of innovation and expect to triple revenue in 2027,” Feldman said in the results statement. For the fourth quarter, Cerebras forecast core revenue of $310m to $330m. Analysts had expected $271m. Tripling revenue in 2027 would mean about $2.85bn, CNBC calculated.
That is slightly below the $2.92bn analysts had forecast. OpenAI and the capacity problem Much of the growth rests on OpenAI. Its compute deal underpins Cerebras’ $26.1bn in remaining performance obligations, the contracted revenue it has not yet booked, Reuters reported. Feldman told analysts that OpenAI’s business with Cerebras grew from the second quarter.
But Cerebras did not have the capacity for a broad rollout of OpenAI’s Ultrafast tier, he said. Capacity is where the money is going. Cerebras has 700 megawatts of data centre capacity contracted for delivery by the end of 2027. That includes new sites in Norway and Finland.
In the first nine months it used $388.9m in its operations and spent $1.05bn on property and equipment. It ended September with $7.8bn in cash and short-term investments. Feldman told CNBC the company is weighing its financing options to keep up with demand. On the call, he said data centre availability limits the whole industry.
US policy changes could make building harder, he added. “As we look to the months ahead, we see two certainties: rapid change and compute shortages,” Feldman told analysts, according to Reuters. Chasing Nvidia The results came on the same day Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO. Feldman told CNBC that long lead times and rising costs for graphics processors create an opening for Cerebras’ own hardware. Even after Thursday’s jump, the stock remains far below the price of its May stock market debut.
It had lost about 47% of its value since listing. Cerebras launched the CS-4 system in August and expects to ship the CS-5 in early summer 2027. Its Wafer Scale Engine 5 processor, the chip inside the CS-5, is already in system testing, the company said. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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