Cerebras Systems (CBRS) Q1 2026 earnings summary

Executive summary

• Achieved Q1 2026 revenue of $193.4 million, up 94% year-over-year, with strong growth in both hardware and cloud/services segments.

• Secured a transformative $20+ billion multi-year agreement with OpenAI for 750MW of AI compute and a definitive agreement with AWS for joint deployments.

• Completed a record-setting IPO, raising $6.4 billion, and raised additional capital through Series H and a $1 billion working capital loan from OpenAI.

• Demonstrated industry-leading AI inference speed, outperforming GPUs by over 13x on large models.

• Launched new AI models and customer trials, including Codex-Spark, Kimi K2.6, and Gemma 4.

Financial highlights

• Hardware revenue reached $111.6 million (up 60% YoY); cloud and services revenue was $82.8 million (up 178% YoY).

• Gross margin improved to 46.5% (core) and 44.6% (GAAP), up from 42.1% and 41.8% a year ago.

• Core non-GAAP operating loss narrowed to -$3.5 million (-2% margin); GAAP net loss was $14.0 million.

• Ended Q1 with $3.3 billion in cash, equivalents, and short-term investments.

• Working Capital Loan from OpenAI: $1.0 billion received, $982.9 million outstanding as of March 31, 2026.

Outlook and guidance

• Q2 2026 core revenue expected at ~$194 million (88% YoY growth), with core gross margin of 36%-38% and operating margin of -30% to -32%.

• Full-year 2026 core revenue projected at $855-$865 million (69% YoY growth), gross margin 38%-41%, and operating margin -28% to -32%.

• Cloud and services revenue expected to comprise a higher share of total revenue due to OpenAI agreement; hardware revenue to decrease as mix shifts.

• Gross margin expected to fluctuate and be lower in the near term due to amortization of customer warrant assets and pass-through data center costs.

• Sufficient liquidity for at least the next 12 months; future capital needs will depend on growth and cloud expansion.