AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems saw its share price fall nearly 20% on Wednesday, despite posting better-than-expected first-quarter results in its debut earnings report as a public company. Revenue reached $193 million, up 94% year-over-year, while net loss narrowed to $14 million from $23.9 million in the prior year period.
The sell-off was driven by full-year gross margin guidance of 38% to 41%, well below the 47% recorded in the first quarter. CEO Andrew Feldman argued that investors had misread the outlook, explaining that Cerebras had chosen to temporarily rent its own systems back from an existing customer in order to make AI compute capacity available sooner while its own data centre infrastructure is built out — a decision that compresses near-term margins but accelerates deployable capacity.
The stock briefly approached its IPO price, marking a new post-listing low.