Cerebras Systems reported 92% year-over-year growth in core revenue for the first quarter of 2026, reaching $191.3 million compared to $99.5 million in the same period last year. The results mark the AI chipmaker's first earnings report as a public company following its blockbuster May IPO, underscoring investor appetite for AI infrastructure at a time when demand for specialized chips to power artificial intelligence workloads continues to accelerate.

Cerebras priced its initial public offering at $185 per share on May 13, 2026, and opened at $350 the next day—an 89% surge that made it the largest semiconductor IPO of 2026, raising $6.4 billion in gross proceeds.

The company's growth reflects a diversifying customer base beyond historical reliance on a single buyer. In June, Cerebras announced a multi-year deal with OpenAI valued at more than $20 billion, under which OpenAI will deploy 750 megawatts of Cerebras' high-speed inference compute over several years. The company also launched a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services to distribute Cerebras' fast inference capabilities globally, with AWS handling the prefill phase of AI model processing while Cerebras handles the inference decode phase.

Hardware revenue grew 59% year-over-year to $110.6 million, while cloud and other services revenue surged 178% to $82.8 million, demonstrating momentum in the company's shift toward cloud-based offerings. Gross margin expanded to 45% on a GAAP basis, with core gross margin reaching 47%, reflecting improved operational leverage as the company scales.

Cerebras' rapid growth outpaces broader industry trends. Global semiconductor sales rose 93.9% from April 2025 to April 2026. The company's 2025 full-year revenue of $510 million represented 76% growth from $290 million in 2024. For full-year 2026, Cerebras guided for core revenue between $855 million and $865 million, representing 69% growth at the midpoint.

Despite strong revenue growth, Cerebras posted a net loss of $14.0 million in the quarter on a GAAP basis, though core net loss narrowed to $2.5 million. The company remains in heavy investment mode, with research and development spending of $75.5 million and sales and marketing expenses of $14.7 million. Cerebras ended the quarter with $3.3 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments, bolstered by IPO proceeds and a $1 billion working capital loan from OpenAI announced in January.