Cerebras Systems reported its first quarterly results since going public, with revenue climbing to $180 million in the quarter ended June 30, 2026, from $103 million a year earlier, a 74% increase. In its 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the AI chip startup said the growth came almost entirely from cloud and AI compute services, where quarterly revenue rose 281% year over year.
The company’s post-IPO results also showed a much larger accounting loss after it recognized a large amount of stock-based compensation. GAAP net loss for the second quarter was $451 million, versus net income of $310 million in the same period last year. Excluding stock-based compensation, amortization of customer warrant assets and other items, Cerebras said its self-defined core operating loss narrowed to $33.61 million from $43.9 million a year earlier.
Cloud services became the main revenue driver
Cerebras’ revenue mix changed sharply during the quarter. Hardware revenue fell 23% to $54.12 million from $70.3 million a year earlier. Cloud and other services revenue, by contrast, surged to $126 million from $33.03 million, up 281%.
That left cloud and other services accounting for about 70% of second-quarter revenue, with hardware making up the remaining 30%. In the same quarter last year, those shares were 32% and 68%, respectively. The filing shows Cerebras moving quickly from selling AI chips and systems to selling AI compute and cloud services directly.
The company said revenue growth was driven by higher customer usage, continued expansion of dedicated cloud compute capacity, and larger contributions from existing customer contracts. For the first half of 2026, total revenue reached $374 million, up 84% from $203 million in the prior-year period.
At the same time, the buildout of compute infrastructure weighed on margins. Gross profit in the second quarter was $25.56 million, and gross margin fell to 14.2% from 31.1% a year earlier. Cerebras said margin was affected by the mix of hardware and cloud revenue, wafer yield, supply chain costs, and data center costs.
GAAP loss widened on stock-based compensation
Operating expenses rose to $503 million in the quarter from $89.28 million a year earlier. Research and development expense alone totaled $320 million. Operating loss came to $477 million, and GAAP net loss was $451 million.
Cerebras recorded $377 million in stock-based compensation expense in the quarter, compared with $13.28 million a year earlier. The company said its initial public offering triggered the liquidity vesting condition for some restricted stock units, requiring it to begin recognizing previously accumulated compensation expense tied to those awards. In the first half of 2026 alone, stock-based compensation recognized because of RSU vesting reached $273.6 million.
Using the company’s non-GAAP presentation, which excludes stock-based compensation, amortization of customer warrant assets, and IPO-related payroll tax expenses, core operating loss for the second quarter was $33.61 million. That was lower than the $43.9 million reported for the same period last year.
OpenAI committed to compute purchases and exercised part of its warrant
The filing also showed that Cerebras’ relationship with OpenAI extends beyond a standard supplier-customer arrangement.
According to the disclosure, the two companies signed a Master Relationship Agreement in December 2025. Under that agreement, OpenAI committed to purchase 750MW of AI inference compute capacity and related services, with deployment planned in stages from 2026 through 2028. OpenAI also holds an option to buy an additional 1.25GW of capacity, with deployment possible by the end of 2030 at the earliest.
In the Subsequent Events section of the filing, Cerebras said for the first time that OpenAI had begun converting warrants into Cerebras shares. Under the MRA, Cerebras had issued OpenAI warrants to purchase up to 33,445,026 shares of Class N common stock at an exercise price of $0.00001 per share.
The company’s latest disclosure said OpenAI partially exercised those warrants in July 2026, acquiring 10,033,508 shares of Class N common stock in a single transaction.
AWS deal adds to expansion of compute deployment
Beyond OpenAI, Cerebras is also extending its compute deployment through Amazon Web Services. The company said it signed a global hardware leasing agreement with AWS in June 2026. The two companies plan to jointly develop and deploy Cerebras compute solutions in AWS data centers, along with related software and support services.
As of the end of the second quarter, Cerebras had signed non-cancelable data center lease contracts that had not yet commenced, with undiscounted future minimum lease payments totaling about $1.5 billion. In the third quarter, it signed additional data center capacity leases carrying about $753.4 million in future minimum lease payments. Based only on the two disclosed sets of contracts, the combined amount exceeds $2.2 billion.