By Anhata Rooprai and Max A. Cherney
Aug 12 (Reuters) – Cerebras Systems raised its annual revenue and gross margin forecasts on Wednesday, buoyed by robust demand for its chips from companies ramping up data-center capacity to power AI services.
Still, its shares were down more than 14% in extended trading after closing up 11.6% in the regular session. The stock has gained 15.5% week-to-date.
The chip designer is banking on growing demand for inference, the data crunching that occurs when a user queries a chatbot, as it seeks to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI processor market.
Cerebras’ flagship wafer-scale engine (WSE) is a single chip the size of a dinner plate containing trillions of transistors, a design that it says is more efficient than connecting thousands of smaller graphics processors together, as Nvidia does.
By placing memory directly on the chip, the WSE is built to accelerate inference and reduce the data-transfer delays associated with conventional graphics processors that rely on separate high-bandwidth memory.
Placing memory directly on the chip has lessened the impact of surging memory prices and placed it in a better position to compete with Nvidia, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman told Reuters in an interview.
“Nvidia’s prices have gone through the roof because of HBM prices,” Feldman said, referring to the high-bandwidth memory included with AI processors. “This is a battleground, and if they can’t deliver or they’re having significant component price increases, of course that helps.”
The Sunnyvale, California-based company expects 2026 adjusted revenue between $880 million and $890 million, higher than its previous forecast of $855 million to $865 million.
“We have made rapid progress in key areas required to deliver exceptional growth against our remaining performance obligations of $25.4 billion (contract revenue expected to be recognized in the future), and plan to more than triple revenue in 2027,” finance chief Bob Komin said.
Annual adjusted gross margin is forecast at 41% to 43%, up from 38% to 41% projected earlier. Analysts, on average, estimate 35.89%, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Second-quarter sales rose 74.3% to $180.11 million. Adjusted loss was $6.91 million, narrower than the $40.5-million loss a year ago.
Cerebras is racing to expand chip volumes to support a $20 billion multi-year agreement to provide AI compute to OpenAI, a deal viewed as key to justifying its valuation.
Its core cloud and services revenue, which reflects the OpenAI ramp, nearly quadrupled to $127.73 million in the second quarter.
(Reporting by Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru and Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)