AI chip designer Cerebras Systems slumped 16% in extended trading on Wednesday after missing quarterly revenue estimates — a sign that Wall Street is ready to punish richly valued AI stocks over any slip on key metrics.
Second-quarter sales rose 74.3% to $180.11 million, but analysts had expected $194.23 million, according to LSEG data. The adjusted loss narrowed to $6.91 million from $40.5 million a year earlier, while adjusted gross margin fell to 40.6% from 46.5% in the prior quarter, partly because the company incurred higher costs to rent computing capacity it had previously deployed at other customers.
Despite the miss, Cerebras raised its 2026 outlook, guiding adjusted revenue to between $880 million and $890 million, up from a previous $855 million to $865 million forecast, and lifting its adjusted gross margin projection to 41%–43%. CFO Bob Komin said the company plans to more than triple revenue in 2027 and expects to grow manufacturing capacity more than tenfold this year.
Results were mixed by segment: cloud revenue roughly quadrupled to $126 million year over year, but hardware sales declined to $54.1 million from $70.3 million. The company is racing to expand chip volumes to support a $20 billion multiyear agreement to provide AI compute to OpenAI, a deal viewed as key to justifying its valuation.
CEO Andrew Feldman argued that putting memory directly on the chip has insulated Cerebras from surging memory prices and positioned it to compete with Nvidia. 'Nvidia's prices have gone through the roof because of HBM prices,' he told Reuters. 'This is a battleground, and if they can't deliver or they're having significant component price increases, of course that helps.' Shares had closed up 11.6% in regular trading before the after-hours slide, and remain more than 40% above the company's May IPO price.
