By Radarr Africa Business Desk
SUNNYVALE, California, November 14 (Radarr Africa) – Cerebras Systems raised its 2026 revenue outlook after third-quarter cloud revenue more than tripled, and said it expects to triple total revenue again in 2027 as demand for fast artificial intelligence inference grows.
The chipmaker, listed on Nasdaq as CBRS, reported on 12 November that revenue under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) was $210.8 million in the quarter ended 30 September, up 55% from a year earlier. On its preferred “core” non-GAAP basis, revenue was $230.9 million, up 70%.
Shares rose about 11% on Friday, according to market reports, even as the wider technology sector fell.
The shift in the business was plain in the numbers. GAAP cloud and other services revenue reached $141.9 million, up 265%, while core cloud revenue was $144.9 million, up 272%. GAAP hardware revenue fell to $68.9 million from $96.8 million a year earlier, as Cerebras leans more heavily on selling capacity in its own data centres rather than shipping systems to customers.
Nine-month GAAP revenue totalled $584.3 million.
Cerebras raised its full-year 2026 core revenue guidance to between $940 million and $960 million, with gross margin of 42% to 44% and an operating margin of negative 10% to negative 8%. For the fourth quarter it expects core revenue of $310 million to $330 million, a gross margin of 47% to 49% and an operating margin between negative 1% and positive 1%.
Profitability remains uneven. GAAP gross margin was 20.0%, up from the previous quarter, while core gross margin was 41.0%, compared with 40.7% a year earlier. The GAAP operating loss was $224.1 million, a margin of negative 106.3%. On a core basis the operating loss was $33.1 million, or negative 14.3%, and core adjusted EBITDA was about negative $3.3 million.
The GAAP net loss widened to $161.2 million from $22.2 million in the third quarter of 2025, and the nine-month GAAP net loss stands at $625.8 million. On a core basis, the company reported net income of $29.8 million.
The balance sheet looks strong. Cerebras held about $7.8 billion in cash, equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investments at the end of September, and had $850 million of debt capacity. Remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue, stood at $26.1 billion.
Chief executive Andrew Feldman said the company’s technology “remains the undisputed champion of speed”. The company said it has now announced a cloud deal with a top-three hyperscaler and has won two new hyperscaler customers in total.
Oracle will integrate Cerebras inference into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with availability planned for 2027. Bilt, a rewards and housing platform, will use Cerebras inference to power its Neighborhood OS platform and Concierge AI assistant, which serve eight million consumers and 50,000 businesses.
Capacity is the constraint Cerebras is racing to relieve. The company said it has secured 700 gross megawatts of data centre capacity for delivery by the end of 2027, and has signed capacity contracts in Norway and Finland. It expects manufacturing capacity to be more than ten times its level at the start of 2026 by the end of this year.
Cerebras said it is the first company to deliver production-scale heterogeneous disaggregated inference, an approach that splits different stages of running an AI model across different kinds of hardware. Its next-generation CS-5 system is targeted for early summer 2027.
Neocloud partnerships, in which smaller specialist cloud providers rent Cerebras capacity to their own customers, are also widening distribution, the company said.
The results arrive at a delicate moment for AI-linked shares. Several AI infrastructure names fell this week as investors reassessed valuations and as leadership turmoil at Nvidia unsettled the sector. Cerebras shares remain well below the $185 price at which they were sold in the company’s May initial public offering, according to market data.
