Nov 12 (Reuters) - Cerebras Systems raised its annual revenue forecast on Thursday, buoyed by surging demand for AI computing capacity as it battles Nvidia and cloud giants, sending its shares nearly 18%
higher in extended trading.
The AI boom has spurred demand for chips used to train models and power inference, the data crunching that occurs when a user queries a chatbot, benefiting chip and cloud companies such as Cerebras.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company is racing to expand chip volumes to capture that demand and support a $20 billion multi-year agreement to provide computing power for OpenAI.
The deal, viewed as key to justifying its valuation, underpins Cerebras' remaining performance obligations of $26.1 billion as of September 30.
Cerebras now expects 2026 adjusted revenue of $940 million to $960 million, up from its previous expectations of $880 million to $890 million.
Its adjusted core cloud and services revenue, which reflects the OpenAI deal, more than tripled to $144.9 million for the third quarter.
Cerebras' flagship wafer-scale engine is a single chip the size of a dinner plate containing trillions of transistors, a design that it says is more efficient than connecting thousands of smaller graphics processors.
By placing memory directly on the chip, the WSE is built to reduce the data-transfer delays associated with conventional graphics processors that rely on separate and expensive high-bandwidth memory.
Third-quarter adjusted sales rose 70% to $230.9 million, beating analysts' average estimate of $214.70 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Net loss widened to 67 cents per share from 41 cents in the same quarter last year.
In July, Cerebras announced a partnership with AMD to combine AMD's Helios systems with its WSE for inference. AMD hardware is set to be deployed in Cerebras data centers and offered through Cerebras Cloud in the second half of 2026.
(Reporting by Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
