Cerebras Raises 2026 Revenue Forecast to $940 Million-$960 Million, Shares Jump 17% After Hours

Since the Nasdaq's 5.52% plunge on Thursday, Nov. 5, put AI-linked stocks on the defensive, investors have been hunting for proof that demand for computing power is real. Cerebras Systems supplied some Thursday evening, Nov. 12.

The chip and cloud company raised its 2026 adjusted revenue forecast to $940 million to $960 million, up from $880 million to $890 million. Its shares rose more than 17% in extended trading. Regular U.S. trading has not opened yet today, so that figure is an after-hours move, not a session price.

The numbers

Third-quarter adjusted sales rose 70% to $230.9 million. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $214.70 million.

Cerebras posted an adjusted profit of $29.82 million, against an adjusted loss of $10.86 million a year earlier. The LSEG consensus had called for an adjusted loss of $38.4 million.

Adjusted cloud and services revenue, which reflects the OpenAI deal, more than tripled to $144.9 million. Remaining performance obligations, the contracted work still to be delivered, stood at $26.1 billion as of Sept. 30. Cerebras says that backlog is underpinned by its agreement to supply computing power to OpenAI.

All of these are adjusted figures, not GAAP results.

Microsoft joins, but details are thin

CEO Andrew Feldman told analysts the company has signed a cloud deal with Microsoft. He said details will be shared next year. No contract value or term has been disclosed.

Feldman also said Oracle will run Cerebras hardware in its data centers, with an inference service expected to launch in summer 2027. Oracle added Cerebras to its cloud AI chip offerings last month.

In July, Cerebras announced a partnership with AMD to pair AMD's Helios systems with its wafer-scale engine for inference. Feldman said the Cerebras cloud now uses AMD graphics processors for prompt processing.

Capacity is the bottleneck

Feldman said OpenAI's business with Cerebras grew from the second quarter. He also said Cerebras lacks the capacity to support a broad rollout of Ultrafast, the faster service tier OpenAI previewed in August for its GPT-5.6 Sol model.

"As we look to the months ahead, we see two certainties: rapid change and compute shortages," Feldman said.

He said data center availability remains a constraint across the industry and that U.S. policy changes could create greater challenges for development.

A week that needed good news

The week ended Nov. 6 was ugly. The Nasdaq Composite fell 3.37%, the S&P 500 dropped 2.68% to 7,376, and the Dow slipped 0.94% to 51,285. The Cboe Volatility Index jumped 32% to 25.64.

On Thursday, Nov. 5, the iShares Semiconductor ETF fell 12.15%. AMD lost 17.24% and Nvidia fell 9.23%.

The midterm elections added to the unease. Democratic victories raised expectations that lawmakers and state officials could slow or restrict data-center construction, particularly where rising electricity demand has become a political issue. Reuters described Cerebras' results as landing amid concerns driven by voter opposition to data centers and uncertainty over Jensen Huang's exit from Nvidia.

David Bahnsen, chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, argued the pullback is not a dip to buy. "A blow-off top happens when euphoria trumps rationality, when hope becomes strategy, and when hype replaces the lessons of history," he told The Epoch Times. He pointed to "the disconnect from valuations and revenue models that make sense."

UBS managing director Jason Katz has taken the opposite view on Fox Business. He argued investors are misreading AI risk and that the current boom differs from the 1990s dot-com bubble, in part because sophisticated technology companies are driving the investment.

Cerebras' numbers do not settle that argument. The company still depends heavily on one customer, and its backlog is tied to an OpenAI contract it is racing to fulfill. The stock had fallen 47.2% from its May IPO price before the report.

The macro backdrop

The broader picture is not calm. Initial jobless claims rose 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 200,000 for the week ended Nov. 7, above the 195,000 economists polled by Reuters had forecast. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in October from 4.2% in September.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran is in its ninth month, and economists say it is boosting inflation. Market commentary Friday morning pointed to renewed bets on a Fed rate hike, the dollar at 160.09 yen, its highest since early September, and Bitcoin slipping below $69,000.

The immediate test comes at the 9:30 a.m. ET open today, when it will be clear whether the after-hours jump in Cerebras survives regular trading. Beyond that, the open questions are the size of the Microsoft deal, which Cerebras has promised to detail next year, and whether the Oracle inference service arrives on schedule in summer 2027.