June 24 (Reuters) – Cerebras shares tumbled about 14% on Wednesday after the chip designer warned that annual profit margins would undershoot first-quarter figures in its debut earnings following a blockbuster initial public offering.
The stock hit $195.75, its lowest level since publicly listing on the Nasdaq last month, and was on track to wipe out more than $6 billion in market value.
Cerebras forecast adjusted gross margins of 38% to 41% for 2026, compared with the 47% it reported for the first quarter.
The projection is far below those of rivals such as Nvidia’s mid-70% range and Advanced Micro Devices’ mid-50%, even as it came above analysts’ estimates of 29.58%.
The California-based company has struck a $20 billion multi-year deal with OpenAI. CEO Andrew Feldman said in a post-earnings call that OpenAI’s GPT 5.4 is running on Cerebras chips. The ChatGPT maker is set to deploy 750 megawatts of the company’s semiconductors as part of the deal.
Feldman also said Amazon Web Services would soon start using the company’s chips in its data centers, with revenue flows expected in the next year.
“Key engagements with OpenAI and AWS are moving forward which is more important to the long-term story,” a group of analysts led by Joshua Buchalter at TD Cowen said.
“Gross margins will be pressured as Cerebras aggressively ramps, but we remain upbeat on Cerebras’ prospects as it scales to support a meaningful revenue inflection.”
Analysts have flagged that gross margins could be pressured by the company manufacturing relatively larger-sized chips, and as it rents back its own systems from an existing client to meet short-term demand while it builds out more data center capacity.
Cerebras’ shares are down more than 37% from its market debut as enthusiasm around artificial intelligence stocks cools and investors fret over the massive spending to build the infrastructure for the new technology.
Still, brokerage Wedbush raised its price target on the stock to $280 from $270, while Morgan Stanley expects the stock to now hit $273 in the next 12 months, from $250 earlier.
“While the need to build out cloud capacity has some risks, we see evidence in these numbers that the company has been conservative in projecting the ramp,” said Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore.
“With demand exceeding supply, and no major supply bottlenecks, we see room for material upside.”
(Reporting by Johann M Cherian in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Pooja Desai)
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