Cerebras cloud revenue nearly quadruples, but shrinking hardware sales knock the stock after hours

by Henry Nakamura · August 12, 2026

Earnings Reporter, Earnings Dispatch

Cerebras Systems delivered its first quarterly report since going public after Wednesday's closing bell — its inaugural 10-Q, covering a period in which the company was public for only about six weeks — and the market's first read was unforgiving. The company said its cloud business nearly quadrupled from a year earlier and lifted its full-year revenue outlook, but the hardware side of the business shrank, the headline revenue figure landed below what analysts had modeled, and shares dropped sharply in extended-hours trading. Because the release came after the close, the stock has not yet traded through a full regular session with the numbers in hand.

According to the company's release distributed via GlobeNewswire, second-quarter GAAP revenue was $180.1 million, up 74% year over year, while what Cerebras calls core revenue — its non-GAAP measure — reached $209.9 million, up 103%. The split underneath is where the story is. GAAP cloud and other services revenue came in at $126.0 million, a 281% increase from a year earlier, with the core version of that line at $127.7 million, up 287%. The inference cloud, in other words, is compounding at a rate that has few peers in the AI infrastructure complex.

Hardware moved the other way, at least on the reported basis. Cerebras reported $54.1 million of GAAP hardware revenue, which a Stocktwits report carried by Yahoo Finance calculated as a 23% decline from the same quarter last year. The company's core measure of the same line was $82.1 million — a reminder that Cerebras publishes two revenue definitions that do not move together, and that which one is used changes the shape of the hardware story. In that report, chief executive Andrew Feldman said, "Hardware is going to be lumpy," and the account attributed the softness to customers not having enough data center space ready to take delivery. That framing matters for how investors read the quarter: a timing problem and a demand problem look identical in a single quarter's revenue line, and the market on Wednesday evening was not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt.

The comparison against Wall Street's models was the immediate sore point. Investing.com reported that revenue of $180.1 million fell short of a $193.6 million consensus, and that adjusted earnings of negative $2.98 per share missed an estimate of negative $0.18. The bulk of that gap is not cash operating performance. The company reported a GAAP net loss of $450.5 million for the quarter, against $377.0 million of stock-based compensation expense recognized in the same three months — the sort of charge that lands in the first reporting period after an initial public offering. Several accounts of the quarter cited $386.6 million of stock-based compensation; that is the year-to-date figure in the company's filing, not the quarterly one. On the company's core basis, the net loss was $6.9 million.

Margins told a similarly two-sided story. GAAP gross margin was 14.2%, while core gross margin came in at 40.6%, an improvement of roughly 940 basis points from a year earlier, per the company's release. The distance between those two numbers is unusually wide even by newly public standards, and reconciling it will likely be a recurring feature of Cerebras earnings calls for several quarters.

Management did not sound defensive about the year. Cerebras guided third-quarter core revenue to $214 million to $216 million, with core gross margin of 38% to 40%. For the full year, it now expects core revenue of $880 million to $890 million, core gross margin of 41% to 43%, and a core operating margin of negative 19% to negative 17%. The Stocktwits report noted the full-year range was raised from a prior $855 million to $865 million and sits above the roughly $867.6 million analysts had been carrying, with the third-quarter midpoint also ahead of a consensus near $212 million.

The forward-looking disclosures were arguably the strongest part of the release. Cerebras cited $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations and roughly 600 megawatts of data center capacity secured, and the Stocktwits account reported the company projecting 2027 revenue to more than triple. Remaining performance obligations are contracted work not yet recognized as revenue, and a figure of that size against a sub-$1 billion revenue year is a claim about the shape of the next several years rather than the next quarter.

Feldman framed the company's pitch around latency rather than raw scale. "This was an outstanding quarter for Cerebras. Core revenue more than doubled to $210 million, and our cloud business nearly quadrupled year-over-year," he said in the release. "Speed changes what AI can do. It makes AI more useful, more productive, and opens entirely new markets. As a result, the demand for fast inference is enormous and Cerebras is scaling to meet it, securing more data center capacity, expanding manufacturing, and growing with customers and partners including OpenAI, AWS, AMD, and CrowdStrike."

The share reaction was steep and, so far, confined to after-hours dealing. Investing.com reported the stock down 14% following the release; the Stocktwits report put the extended-hours decline at 15%. That came against a backdrop of a firm regular session — the Nasdaq Composite closed up 0.54% at 26,588.49 and Nvidia gained 3.03%, per Investing.com's close report — and after a strong run for Cerebras itself, which the Stocktwits report described as up roughly 42% year to date heading into the print. How much of Wednesday evening's move survives Thursday's opening auction is the next data point, and it will be the first time the full institutional base has a chance to trade the quarter.