Cerebras Nearly Quadruples Cloud Revenue but Drops 15% After Hours
Cerebras Q2 cloud revenue surges 281%, beats estimates, lands OpenAI and AMD deals — but stock drops 15% after hours
- Cloud revenue nearly quadrupled: GAAP cloud revenue hit $126M (+281% YoY); core total revenue reached $210M (+103% YoY).
- Stock dropped ~15% after hours despite beating EPS estimates, as GAAP revenue of $180M missed the $194M analyst consensus.
- OpenAI partnership deepened: Cerebras is now the launch partner for GPT-5.6 Sol, serving it at 750 tokens per second.
- Disaggregated inference with AMD and AWS: AMD Helios handles prefill, Cerebras WSE handles decode — claiming 5x throughput gains; production in Q4 2026, AWS Bedrock in Q1 2027.
- Massive backlog and raised guidance: $25.4B in remaining performance obligations; full-year 2026 core revenue guidance raised to $880–$890M; plans to triple revenue in 2027.
- Supply chain moat: Cerebras avoids HBM, CoWoS, and 3nm — the three most constrained components in AI chip manufacturing — giving it a structural scaling advantage.
Cerebras Systems just posted its second quarterly earnings report as a public company, and the numbers are hard to ignore. Cloud and other services revenue hit a record $126 million on a GAAP basis, up 281% year-over-year, while core cloud revenue reached $127.7 million, up 287%. The cloud business has nearly quadrupled in a single year. And yet, the market was not impressed , at least not immediately.
Following the earnings release, CBRS declined roughly 15% in after-hours trading. The stock tumbled about 14% in extended trading, even as the company beat on EPS , reporting a loss of 5 cents adjusted versus 17 cents expected. The culprit: GAAP revenue of $180 million came in below the $194 million analysts had penciled in, a gap driven largely by how Cerebras accounts for its non-standard revenue structure.
The Numbers Behind the Headline
To understand Cerebras's financials, you need to know the difference between its GAAP and "core" (non-GAAP) numbers. GAAP total revenue came in at $180.1 million, up 74% year-over-year, while core total revenue , which strips out pass-through data center costs and adds back non-cash customer warrant amortization , reached $209.9 million, up 103%. The company's guidance and analyst expectations were set against the core number, which is why the beat/miss picture is confusing at first glance.
- Record GAAP cloud revenue: $126.0M (+281% YoY); Core cloud revenue: $127.7M (+287% YoY)
- Core gross margin: 41%, an improvement of approximately 940 basis points from Q2 2025
- Core EPS beat: reported loss of $0.04 per share vs. estimates of -$0.17
- Remaining performance obligations (RPO): $25.4 billion as of June 30, 2026
- Data center capacity under contract: over 600 MW; manufacturing capacity scaling more than 10x in 2026
- Full-year 2026 core revenue guidance raised to $880–$890 million, up from a prior range of $855–$865 million
CEO Andrew Feldman summarized it simply: "Core revenue more than doubled to $210 million, and our cloud business nearly quadrupled year-over-year." CFO Bob Komin added that the company plans to more than triple revenue in 2027. That is an aggressive target, but it is backstopped by $25.4 billion in already-contracted future revenue.
Why Speed Is the Product
Cerebras's core thesis is that inference latency is not just a performance metric , it is a product differentiator that unlocks entirely new use cases. The company's