TLDR
- Cerebras (CBRS) reports its first earnings as a public company Tuesday after the bell, with Q1 revenue expected at ~$183M, up over 80% year-over-year.
- Options traders are pricing in a move of up to 13% in either direction by end of week.
- The stock IPO’d at $185 in May, hit $386 on day one, and closed Monday at $224.43.
- 11 analysts have initiated coverage with an average Buy rating and $294 price target.
- A lock-up expiry this Thursday will make nearly 13% of IPO shares eligible for insider selling.
Cerebras Systems will release its first-ever earnings report as a public company Tuesday after the closing bell. It’s a moment investors have been waiting for since the chipmaker’s splashy May IPO, and the stakes are high.
The stock priced at $185 and surged to $386 on its first day of trading. Since then, it has been anything but calm. Over 19 of the 25 trading days since the IPO, the stock moved more than 3% in a single session. It closed Monday at $224.43.
Wall Street is bracing for another big swing. Based on current options pricing, traders expect CBRS to move up to 13% in either direction by the end of the week. That would put the upper range around $254, or drag it below $195.
Analysts are expecting Q1 revenue of roughly $181–$183 million — an 82% jump from the same period last year. The company is still operating at a loss, with a consensus adjusted loss of 16 cents per share.
The OpenAI Factor
A major piece of the Cerebras story is its $20 billion multiyear cloud contract with OpenAI. OpenAI currently uses Cerebras’ cloud to run Codex-Spark, one of its coding models.
But investors need to understand the contra-revenue piece. Cerebras granted OpenAI warrants for 33.4 million shares, practically for free. As those warrants vest, the value is recorded as a discount against revenue. In Q1, 4.5 million shares vested. Needham analyst Quinn Bolton says the charge will be modest in the first quarter, but will grow as the OpenAI contract scales up.
To help investors cut through the noise, Cerebras will report a “core revenue” figure that excludes contra-revenue.
The company also has a binding term sheet with Amazon Web Services, which would make AWS the first major cloud provider to host Cerebras chips.
At the end of 2025, the company’s backlog stood at $24.6 billion, almost entirely from the OpenAI deal. It expects to recognize $3.7 billion of that as revenue across 2026 and 2027.
Lock-Up Watch
One overhang investors are watching closely is a lock-up expiry coming this Thursday. At that point, nearly 13% of the shares sold in the IPO will become eligible for insiders and early investors to sell. That added supply could weigh on the stock price.
Only about 15% of total shares outstanding were sold during the IPO. The rest remain locked up, with a second unlock trigger set to hit two days after Cerebras reports its Q2 earnings.
Eleven analysts have initiated coverage so far. The average price target is $294, with firms like Wedbush ($270), UBS ($300), and Morgan Stanley ($250) all rating it a Buy. Analysts project core revenue of $7.2 billion by 2028, with adjusted EPS of $5.53. At Monday’s close, the stock traded at 41 times that 2028 earnings estimate.
The Q1 period ended in March, before the IPO, so changes to the balance sheet and cash flow statement from the public offering will not yet appear in the results.
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