Cerebras Systems (CBRS) Revenue Surges: Why Did CBRS Stock Crash, and What About AMD?

On August 12, 2026, shares of AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems (CBRS) dropped by around 14% in extended trading, even though the company's second-quarter revenue surged by 74.3% year over year. The stock had been trading at $185 following its May 2026 IPO, and despite a post-earnings slide, the shares closed the day at $262.06, up 42% from the IPO price.

Cerebras positioned itself as a competitor to Nvidia during its IPO, but the mixed results of this quarter have investors questioning how much the company has shifted towards cloud services rather than chip sales. The company reported a total second-quarter revenue of $180.1 million, missing the expected $194.2 million. The adjusted loss per share narrowed to 5 cents, well below the $40.5 million loss from the previous year.

CEO Andrew Feldman attributed the strong demand for AI to fast-inference pricing, which has lifted margins. The firm raised its full-year core revenue guidance to $880 million to $890 million and its annual adjusted gross margin target to 41% to 43%. Despite the earnings miss, Cerebras still had $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations.

The company's growth now comes more from renting out its AI systems to cloud customers rather than selling chips, with hardware sales falling to $54.1 million from $70.3 million a year earlier. Cerebras partnered with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in July 2026 to combine their chips in AMD's Helios AI systems, which reportedly delivers five times higher tokens per second per watt than competing setups.

However, AMD faces competition from Nvidia, which acquired Groq's assets in December 2025 to integrate similar technology into its own systems.