News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Cerebras Has a $25.4 Billion Backlog, and One OpenAI Agreement Is Behind Much of It
By most measures, Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ:CBRS) delivered an outstanding second quarter. The artificial intelligence (AI) computing specialist grew its non-GAAP (adjusted) revenue 103% year over year to $209.9 million. Its inference cloud business nearly quadrupled, and management raised its full-year outlook to a range of $880 million to $890 million in adjusted revenue. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " But the most important number in the mid-August update wasn't on the income statement at all. Cerebras ended June with $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations, the backlog of contracted work it hasn't yet delivered or recognized as revenue. That's nearly 29 times the revenue management expects for all of 2026, a figure lifted by data center costs passed through to OpenAI. A figure that large deserves scrutiny. The company's own filings say where to look: at a single agreement with OpenAI. Image source: Getty Images. The backlog arrived almost all at once In December 2025, Cerebras signed a master relationship agreement with the ChatGPT maker under which OpenAI committed to purchase 750 megawatts of computing capacity for AI inference -- a deal Cerebras has valued at more than $20 billion. OpenAI also holds an option to buy an additional 1.25 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2030. Remaining performance obligations were $24.6 billion at the close of 2025, then edged up to $25.0 billion in March and $25.4 billion in June. The balance grew only about 3% over the first half of 2026. Nearly all of it was on the books before 2026 began. And Cerebras says in its latest quarterly filing that a significant amount of the balance is attributable to its obligations under the OpenAI agreement. Cerebras recognized $56.8 million of revenue under the arrangement in the second quarter, or about 32% of the company's $180.1 million in revenue under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which grew 74% year over year. When does the backlog become revenue? The backlog converts slowly, by design. Cerebras expects to recognize only about 22% of the $25.4 billion (about $5.6 billion) over the 24 months ending June 30, 2028. Another 43% should arrive between months 25 and 48, with the rest coming later. Of course, the timing can shift at the customer's request. It's worth noting, though, that the near-term share has moved up. At the close of 2025, Cerebras expected about 15% of the balance to convert in the 24 months through 2027. The latest figure is 22%, though it covers a window ending six months later. The conversion takes years partly because Cerebras is still building the thing it has sold. Capacity for OpenAI deploys in stages from 2026 through 2028. Cerebras says more than 600 megawatts of data center capacity is live or under contract for delivery by the end of 2027, with manufacturing capacity set to grow more than tenfold in 2026. And just this week, Cerebras announced a new 165-megawatt data center in Finland. OpenAI is even helping to finance the build-out, advancing Cerebras a $1 billion working capital loan in January. Concentration isn't new here In 2025, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence accounted for 62% of the company's revenue, and Group 42 accounted for another 24%. Those figures are shares of last year's revenue, not of the backlog. But the pattern held in the second quarter, when three customers each accounted for at least 10% of revenue, or 76% of it between them. The company doesn't say exactly how much of the $25.4 billion sits with OpenAI. Either way, a short list of buyers is doing most of the buying. That matters because of the stock's valuation. With shares around $215 as of this writing (down about 44% from their 52-week high of $386.34), the whole company is valued near $51 billion -- nearly 58 times the adjusted revenue management expects this year, for a company still posting operating losses. Even if revenue more than triples in 2027, as management plans, the stock would trade at about 19 times those expected sales. What, then, is the backlog worth to a shareholder? A lot, I think -- just not everything the headline number implies. The $25.4 billion includes a customer's multiyear commitment, not revenue in hand. And most of it is scheduled to convert after mid-2028, by a company that must build enormous capacity on time, much of it for one buyer whose needs could change. The business itself is executing well. Adjusted gross margin improved about nine percentage points from a year ago, and Cerebras holds about $8.6 billion in cash and investments after May's initial public offering. Ultimately, the backlog is evidence of extraordinary demand and arguably the best reason to keep watching Cerebras closely. But I'd want to see the OpenAI revenue step up for a few more quarters before paying today's price. Should you buy stock in Cerebras Systems right now? Before you buy stock in Cerebras Systems, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now... and Cerebras Systems wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $421,997!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,413,876!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 978% -- a market-crushing outperformance compared to 213% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors. See the 10 stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 5, 2026. Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Cerebras Has a $25.4 Billion Backlog, and One OpenAI Agreement Is Behind Much of It
By most measures, Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ:CBRS) delivered an outstanding second quarter. The artificial intelligence (AI) computing specialist grew its non-GAAP (adjusted) revenue 103% year over year to $209.9 million. Its inference cloud business nearly quadrupled, and management raised its full-year outlook to a range of $880 million to $890 million in adjusted revenue. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " But the most important number in the mid-August update wasn't on the income statement at all. Cerebras ended June with $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations, the backlog of contracted work it hasn't yet delivered or recognized as revenue. That's nearly 29 times the revenue management expects for all of 2026, a figure lifted by data center costs passed through to OpenAI. A figure that large deserves scrutiny. The company's own filings say where to look: at a single agreement with OpenAI. Image source: Getty Images. The backlog arrived almost all at once In December 2025, Cerebras signed a master relationship agreement with the ChatGPT maker under which OpenAI committed to purchase 750 megawatts of computing capacity for AI inference -- a deal Cerebras has valued at more than $20 billion. OpenAI also holds an option to buy an additional 1.25 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2030. Remaining performance obligations were $24.6 billion at the close of 2025, then edged up to $25.0 billion in March and $25.4 billion in June. The balance grew only about 3% over the first half of 2026. Nearly all of it was on the books before 2026 began. And Cerebras says in its latest quarterly filing that a significant amount of the balance is attributable to its obligations under the OpenAI agreement. Cerebras recognized $56.8 million of revenue under the arrangement in the second quarter, or about 32% of the company's $180.1 million in revenue under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which grew 74% year over year. When does the backlog become revenue? The backlog converts slowly, by design. Cerebras expects to recognize only about 22% of the $25.4 billion (about $5.6 billion) over the 24 months ending June 30, 2028. Another 43% should arrive between months 25 and 48, with the rest coming later. Of course, the timing can shift at the customer's request.
Cerebras Has a $25.4 Billion Backlog, and One OpenAI Agreement Is Behind Much of It
By most measures, Cerebras Systems (CBRS +10.30%) delivered an outstanding second quarter. The artificial intelligence (AI) computing specialist grew its non-GAAP (adjusted) revenue 103% year over year to $209.9 million. Its inference cloud business nearly quadrupled, and management raised its full-year outlook to a range of $880 million to $890 million in adjusted revenue. But the most important number in the mid-August update wasn't on the income statement at all. Cerebras ended June with $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations, the backlog of contracted work it hasn't yet delivered or recognized as revenue. That's nearly 29 times the revenue management expects for all of 2026, a figure lifted by data center costs passed through to OpenAI. A figure that large deserves scrutiny. The company's own filings say where to look: at a single agreement with OpenAI. The backlog arrived almost all at once In December 2025, Cerebras signed a master relationship agreement with the ChatGPT maker under which OpenAI committed to purchase 750 megawatts of computing capacity for AI inference -- a deal Cerebras has valued at more than $20 billion. OpenAI also holds an option to buy an additional 1.25 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2030. Remaining performance obligations were $24.6 billion at the close of 2025, then edged up to $25.0 billion in March and $25.4 billion in June. The balance grew only about 3% over the first half of 2026. Nearly all of it was on the books before 2026 began. And Cerebras says in its latest quarterly filing that a significant amount of the balance is attributable to its obligations under the OpenAI agreement. Cerebras recognized $56.8 million of revenue under the arrangement in the second quarter, or about 32% of the company's $180.1 million in revenue under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which grew 74% year over year. When does the backlog become revenue? The backlog converts slowly, by design. Cerebras expects to recognize only about 22% of the $25.4 billion (about $5.6 billion) over the 24 months ending June 30, 2028. Another 43% should arrive between months 25 and 48, with the rest coming later. Of course, the timing can shift at the customer's request. It's worth noting, though, that the near-term share has moved up. At the close of 2025, Cerebras expected about 15% of the balance to convert in the 24 months through 2027. The latest figure is 22%, though it covers a window ending six months later. The conversion takes years partly because Cerebras is still building the thing it has sold. Capacity for OpenAI deploys in stages from 2026 through 2028. Cerebras says more than 600 megawatts of data center capacity is live or under contract for delivery by the end of 2027, with manufacturing capacity set to grow more than tenfold in 2026. And just this week, Cerebras announced a new 165-megawatt data center in Finland. OpenAI is even helping to finance the build-out, advancing Cerebras a $1 billion working capital loan in January. Concentration isn't new here In 2025, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence accounted for 62% of the company's revenue, and Group 42 accounted for another 24%. Those figures are shares of last year's revenue, not of the backlog. But the pattern held in the second quarter, when three customers each accounted for at least 10% of revenue, or 76% of it between them. The company doesn't say exactly how much of the $25.4 billion sits with OpenAI. Either way, a short list of buyers is doing most of the buying. That matters because of the stock's valuation. With shares around $215 as of this writing (down about 44% from their 52-week high of $386.34), the whole company is valued near $51 billion -- nearly 58 times the adjusted revenue management expects this year, for a company still posting operating losses. Even if revenue more than triples in 2027, as management plans, the stock would trade at about 19 times those expected sales. What, then, is the backlog worth to a shareholder? A lot, I think -- just not everything the headline number implies. The $25.4 billion includes a customer's multiyear commitment, not revenue in hand. And most of it is scheduled to convert after mid-2028, by a company that must build enormous capacity on time, much of it for one buyer whose needs could change. The business itself is executing well. Adjusted gross margin improved about nine percentage points from a year ago, and Cerebras holds about $8.6 billion in cash and investments after May's initial public offering. Ultimately, the backlog is evidence of extraordinary demand and arguably the best reason to keep watching Cerebras closely. But I'd want to see the OpenAI revenue step up for a few more quarters before paying today's price.
Why Cerebras Stock (CBRS) Is Soaring Today -- Sept. 4, 2026
Shares in U.S. chipmaker Cerebras Systems (CBRS) climbed by more than 12% to around $214 on Friday afternoon. This came amid a rally in AI chip stocks and a sentiment boost triggered by Nvidia's (NVDA) roughly $13 billion acquisition deal for Hugging Face. Notably, CBRS has also closed higher over the past two days after the company announced a new AI data center in Mikkeli, Finland. Cerebras Stock Joins AI Chip Stock Rally For context, Cerebras is an AI infrastructure company. It builds the world's largest computer chips called the Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE). The company creates single, giant processors the size of an entire silicon wafer to speed up AI training and applications. Cerebras shares joined the chip-stock rally on Friday. The rally came as analysts hailed Nvidia's plan to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source platform used for AI development. For instance, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Kevin Cassidy sees the deal as Nvidia "continuing to use its balance sheet to maintain the health of the AI ecosystem as it rapidly expands." AI chip stocks also rallied as U.S. Treasury yields remained stable on Friday. This is because lower or steady yields could translate to lower borrowing costs for investors. Cerebras Stock Rallies on Data Center Footprint Expansion Meanwhile, CBRS stock rose on Friday, building on its gains over the past two days. The stock has been rising since September 2, a day after Cerebras announced its new AI data center in Mikkeli, Finland. This expands the company's data center footprint. Cerebras developed the new facility in partnership with data center operator Compute Nordic Finland. The center is expected to scale gradually to 165 MW. Is Cerebras a Good Stock to Buy? On Wall Street, Cerebras' shares boast a Strong Buy consensus rating from analysts. This is based on 10 Buys assigned since Cerebras made its Nasdaq debut in mid-May. In addition, the average CBRS price target of $296 implies about 40% upside (see CBRS stock forecast here).
Coatue Opened Positions in Intel and Cerebras. Is the AI Chip Trade Broadening Beyond NVIDIA?
Coatue Management's Q2 filing disclosed a new position in Intel and, for the first time, a reportable position in newly public Cerebras. Coatue reported 12,084,027 Intel shares and roughly 7.01 million Cerebras shares at June 30. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) offers manufacturing and established distribution, while Cerebras Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CBRS) offers a radically different wafer-scale architecture. Close-up of Silicon Die are being Extracted from Semiconductor Wafer and Attached to Substrate by Pick and Place Machine. Computer Chip Manufacturing at Fab. Semiconductor Packaging Process. Intel's bull case is strategic relevance. Its CPU franchise, foundry ambitions, advanced packaging, and domestic manufacturing footprint could benefit as governments and customers seek more supply options. The new Coatue position joins a broader increase in professional participation: Insider Monkey counted 138 hedge funds holding INTC at June 30, up from 112 at March 31. Its bear case is capital intensity and competitive execution. Intel must spend heavily while defending share against AMD and proving its foundry can win external customers. Recent equity financing adds dilution, and a turnaround can consume cash for years before margins recover. Coatue's filing shows quarter-end ownership, not when shares were bought or why. Cerebras gives the diversification thesis more direct AI exposure. Its Q2 non-GAAP core revenue reached $209.9 million, up 103% year over year, and cloud-service revenue grew rapidly as customers rented inference rather than purchased hardware. As a new public company, CBRS had 78 hedge funds in Q2. Coatue's disclosed position was worth roughly $1.5 billion, making it economically meaningful. The counterargument is volatility and business mix. Cerebras's total Q2 revenue was about $180.1 million under GAAP presentation, while hardware sales fell 23% to $54.1 million and shares dropped sharply after results. Cloud growth can be attractive but may require the company to fund capacity and accept lower near-term margins. Customer concentration and competition from NVIDIA ecosystems remain central risks. Intel's August 14 short-interest snapshot showed 135.69 million shares sold short, with 1.26 days to cover; estimates put that near 2.7% of shares outstanding. It predates the public analysis of Coatue's filing. The filing supports a broadening thesis, not a verdict. Intel must prove manufacturing economics; Cerebras must prove scalable cloud margins. NVIDIA's dominance weakens only if challengers translate technical alternatives into durable, profitable customer adoption.
The Anthropic IPO May Be Right Around the Corner. Here's What Investors Need to Know. - AOL
This year has been a major one for initial public offerings, even producing the biggest IPO on record: the Space Exploration Technologies operation. Including the exercise of an overallotment option, SpaceX raised more than $85 billion and entered the market with a trillion-dollar valuation. Now, all eyes are focused on the next IPO, one that could be even larger than that of SpaceX. I'm talking about the upcoming Anthropic market debut. The artificial intelligence (AI) lab, maker of the famous AI assistant Claude, confidentially filed a draft registration statement with regulators in June. And news reports suggest an IPO may be right around the corner. Here's what investors need to know. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again.In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " Why IPOs spark excitement So, first, a quick look at why the launch of companies involved in AI -- from SpaceX to AI chip designer Cerebras Systems -- has sparked excitement and drawn investors' attention. It's important to note that IPOs generally garner attention as they present new investing opportunities. On top of this, the AI market, heading toward a value of $3 trillion in just a few years, according to analysts, represents a massive growth opportunity. Publicly traded AI leaders such as Nvidia and Amazon have seen revenue skyrocket in recent years, so investors are eager to get in on the next new AI story. Now, let's consider Anthropic and what you as an investor need to know. The company is the maker of the Claude AI assistant, the popular Claude Code coding tool, and other AI-driven products, and these are in high demand. TechCrunch, citing an Anthropic spokesperson, reported that Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled in 2026. In May, Anthropic raised $65 billion in Series H funding, pushing its valuation to $965 billion. At the time, the company said its revenue run rate had surpassed $47 billion. AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been key players in the AI story, calling for a ramp-up in AI infrastructure from cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This increase in compute results in higher revenue for them -- more compute allows Anthropic and OpenAI to supercharge the performance of their large language models and serve more customers. Anthropic's confidential filing In recent months, investors have been looking to the IPO plans of each company, and Anthropic became the first to file, confidentially, with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a confidential filing, a company provides financial data to regulators but doesn't yet release these details to the public. Anthropic hasn't offered an update on its plans, but The Information recently reported that a prospectus would be made public after the Labor Day holiday and that a market debut is planned for late this month or early next month. The publication cited people familiar with the situation. According to the report, Anthropic expects to surpass the size of SpaceX's IPO. And several publications have said that Anthropic is targeting a valuation of $2 trillion. The Information also said that Anthropic may allow existing shareholders to sell shares during the IPO. The positive is that this broadens the pool of available shares; the negative is that cash from those sales goes to the respective shareholders, not the company. And if key insiders sell, potential investors may view this as a lack of confidence in the future. These elements offer us clues about what to expect, but it's important to review Anthropic's prospectus when it becomes available to confirm these and other details. Investors should focus on financial information, including revenue from Claude, gross margin, and the status of existing contracts. Investors should also pay close attention to what the company considers potential risks. This will help you determine whether an investment in this IPO stock is right for you -- an aggressive investor may make a different decision than a cautious investor. So, right now, if you're interested in possibly participating in the Anthropic IPO, the best thing you can do is stay tuned for the official filing -- which may be just ahead -- and examine it carefully. Where to invest $1,000 right now When our analyst team has a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, Stock Advisor's total average return is 983%* -- a market-crushing outperformance compared to 212% for the S&P 500. They just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now, available when you joinStock Advisor. See the stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 3, 2026. Adria Cimino has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The Anthropic IPO May Be Right Around the Corner. Here's What Investors Need to Know.
This year has been a major one for initial public offerings, even producing the biggest IPO on record: the Space Exploration Technologies operation. Including the exercise of an overallotment option, SpaceX raised more than $85 billion and entered the market with a trillion-dollar valuation. Now, all eyes are focused on the next IPO, one that could be even larger than that of SpaceX. I'm talking about the upcoming Anthropic market debut. The artificial intelligence (AI) lab, maker of the famous AI assistant Claude, confidentially filed a draft registration statement with regulators in June. And news reports suggest an IPO may be right around the corner. Here's what investors need to know. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " Image source: Getty Images. Why IPOs spark excitement So, first, a quick look at why the launch of companies involved in AI -- from SpaceX to AI chip designer Cerebras Systems -- has sparked excitement and drawn investors' attention. It's important to note that IPOs generally garner attention as they present new investing opportunities. On top of this, the AI market, heading toward a value of $3 trillion in just a few years, according to analysts, represents a massive growth opportunity. Publicly traded AI leaders such as Nvidia and Amazon have seen revenue skyrocket in recent years, so investors are eager to get in on the next new AI story. Now, let's consider Anthropic and what you as an investor need to know. The company is the maker of the Claude AI assistant, the popular Claude Code coding tool, and other AI-driven products, and these are in high demand. TechCrunch, citing an Anthropic spokesperson, reported that Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled in 2026. In May, Anthropic raised $65 billion in Series H funding, pushing its valuation to $965 billion. At the time, the company said its revenue run rate had surpassed $47 billion. AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been key players in the AI story, calling for a ramp-up in AI infrastructure from cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This increase in compute results in higher revenue for them -- more compute allows Anthropic and OpenAI to supercharge the performance of their large language models and serve more customers. Anthropic's confidential filing In recent months, investors have been looking to the IPO plans of each company, and Anthropic became the first to file, confidentially, with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a confidential filing, a company provides financial data to regulators but doesn't yet release these details to the public. Anthropic hasn't offered an update on its plans, but The Information recently reported that a prospectus would be made public after the Labor Day holiday and that a market debut is planned for late this month or early next month. The publication cited people familiar with the situation. According to the report, Anthropic expects to surpass the size of SpaceX's IPO. And several publications have said that Anthropic is targeting a valuation of $2 trillion. The Information also said that Anthropic may allow existing shareholders to sell shares during the IPO. The positive is that this broadens the pool of available shares; the negative is that cash from those sales goes to the respective shareholders, not the company. And if key insiders sell, potential investors may view this as a lack of confidence in the future. These elements offer us clues about what to expect, but it's important to review Anthropic's prospectus when it becomes available to confirm these and other details. Investors should focus on financial information, including revenue from Claude, gross margin, and the status of existing contracts. Investors should also pay close attention to what the company considers potential risks. This will help you determine whether an investment in this IPO stock is right for you -- an aggressive investor may make a different decision than a cautious investor. So, right now, if you're interested in possibly participating in the Anthropic IPO, the best thing you can do is stay tuned for the official filing -- which may be just ahead -- and examine it carefully. Where to invest $1,000 right now When our analyst team has a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, Stock Advisor's total average return is 983%* -- a market-crushing outperformance compared to 212% for the S&P 500. They just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 3, 2026. Adria Cimino has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The Anthropic IPO May Be Right Around the Corner. Here's What Investors Need to Know.
This year has been a major one for initial public offerings, even producing the biggest IPO on record: the Space Exploration Technologies operation. Including the exercise of an overallotment option, SpaceX raised more than $85 billion and entered the market with a trillion-dollar valuation. Now, all eyes are focused on the next IPO, one that could be even larger than that of SpaceX. I'm talking about the upcoming Anthropic market debut. The artificial intelligence (AI) lab, maker of the famous AI assistant Claude, confidentially filed a draft registration statement with regulators in June. And news reports suggest an IPO may be right around the corner. Here's what investors need to know. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " Image source: Getty Images. Why IPOs spark excitement So, first, a quick look at why the launch of companies involved in AI -- from SpaceX to AI chip designer Cerebras Systems -- has sparked excitement and drawn investors' attention. It's important to note that IPOs generally garner attention as they present new investing opportunities. On top of this, the AI market, heading toward a value of $3 trillion in just a few years, according to analysts, represents a massive growth opportunity. Publicly traded AI leaders such as Nvidia and Amazon have seen revenue skyrocket in recent years, so investors are eager to get in on the next new AI story. Now, let's consider Anthropic and what you as an investor need to know. The company is the maker of the Claude AI assistant, the popular Claude Code coding tool, and other AI-driven products, and these are in high demand. TechCrunch, citing an Anthropic spokesperson, reported that Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled in 2026. In May, Anthropic raised $65 billion in Series H funding, pushing its valuation to $965 billion. At the time, the company said its revenue run rate had surpassed $47 billion. AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been key players in the AI story, calling for a ramp-up in AI infrastructure from cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This increase in compute results in higher revenue for them -- more compute allows Anthropic and OpenAI to supercharge the performance of their large language models and serve more customers.
The Anthropic IPO May Be Right Around the Corner. Here's What Investors Need to Know.
This year has been a major one for initial public offerings, even producing the biggest IPO on record: the Space Exploration Technologies operation. Including the exercise of an overallotment option, SpaceX raised more than $85 billion and entered the market with a trillion-dollar valuation. Now, all eyes are focused on the next IPO, one that could be even larger than that of SpaceX. I'm talking about the upcoming Anthropic market debut. The artificial intelligence (AI) lab, maker of the famous AI assistant Claude, confidentially filed a draft registration statement with regulators in June. And news reports suggest an IPO may be right around the corner. Here's what investors need to know. Why IPOs spark excitement So, first, a quick look at why the launch of companies involved in AI -- from SpaceX to AI chip designer Cerebras Systems -- has sparked excitement and drawn investors' attention. It's important to note that IPOs generally garner attention as they present new investing opportunities. On top of this, the AI market, heading toward a value of $3 trillion in just a few years, according to analysts, represents a massive growth opportunity. Publicly traded AI leaders such as Nvidia and Amazon have seen revenue skyrocket in recent years, so investors are eager to get in on the next new AI story. Now, let's consider Anthropic and what you as an investor need to know. The company is the maker of the Claude AI assistant, the popular Claude Code coding tool, and other AI-driven products, and these are in high demand. TechCrunch, citing an Anthropic spokesperson, reported that Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled in 2026. In May, Anthropic raised $65 billion in Series H funding, pushing its valuation to $965 billion. At the time, the company said its revenue run rate had surpassed $47 billion. AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have been key players in the AI story, calling for a ramp-up in AI infrastructure from cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This increase in compute results in higher revenue for them -- more compute allows Anthropic and OpenAI to supercharge the performance of their large language models and serve more customers. Anthropic's confidential filing In recent months, investors have been looking to the IPO plans of each company, and Anthropic became the first to file, confidentially, with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a confidential filing, a company provides financial data to regulators but doesn't yet release these details to the public. Anthropic hasn't offered an update on its plans, but The Information recently reported that a prospectus would be made public after the Labor Day holiday and that a market debut is planned for late this month or early next month. The publication cited people familiar with the situation. According to the report, Anthropic expects to surpass the size of SpaceX's IPO. And several publications have said that Anthropic is targeting a valuation of $2 trillion. The Information also said that Anthropic may allow existing shareholders to sell shares during the IPO. The positive is that this broadens the pool of available shares; the negative is that cash from those sales goes to the respective shareholders, not the company. And if key insiders sell, potential investors may view this as a lack of confidence in the future. These elements offer us clues about what to expect, but it's important to review Anthropic's prospectus when it becomes available to confirm these and other details. Investors should focus on financial information, including revenue from Claude, gross margin, and the status of existing contracts. Investors should also pay close attention to what the company considers potential risks. This will help you determine whether an investment in this IPO stock is right for you -- an aggressive investor may make a different decision than a cautious investor. So, right now, if you're interested in possibly participating in the Anthropic IPO, the best thing you can do is stay tuned for the official filing -- which may be just ahead -- and examine it carefully.
Cerebras plans 165 MW Finland AI data center with first 50 MW under construction
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) announced a 165 MW AI data center in Mikkeli, Finland, with Compute Nordic Finland. The initial 50 MW of contracted IT capacity is already under construction. The partners plan to increase capacity from 50 MW to 80 MW before reaching the full 165 MW. Cerebras said multiple service orders cover the capacity, with each carrying a seven-year term. An assessment cited by Cerebras estimated €1.0 billion to €1.7 billion of regional investment at full build-out. The project could support 80 to 250 direct permanent jobs and generate between €0.8 million and €2.5 million in annual property-tax revenue. Stay ahead of AI infrastructure deals. Get Blockspace in your inbox. Seven-year orders support the build-out Compute Nordic Finland CEO Pyry Virrantaus said the phased project is backed by existing demand rather than projected customer interest. "This partnership with Cerebras is not a speculative bet on future demand -- it's a contractually committed, phased build-out that reflects exactly how much AI compute the market needs today and where that need is heading," Virrantaus said in the project announcement. Compute Nordic Finland will oversee development, operations, customer relationships and program governance. Cerebras intends to use the facility for its high-density AI compute platform. The partners have identified permanent positions in site operations, power and cooling engineering, networking, security, and facility management. The employment estimate comes from a Ramboll market study and impact assessment dated September 12, 2025. Closed-loop cooling and heat recovery Closed-loop cooling is part of the Mikkeli facility's design, recirculating water instead of continuously drawing it from the municipal supply. It also incorporates heat-recovery infrastructure intended to make thermal energy from the compute systems available to the surrounding community. "Our architecture is built to get more useful AI output out of every megawatt we deploy," Cerebras CEO and co-founder Andrew Feldman said. "Mikkeli lets us pair that efficiency with a data centre designed for closed-loop cooling and heat reuse from the ground up." Cerebras did not provide a commissioning schedule for each phase or disclose pricing under the service orders. The announcement also did not say when the heat-recovery system would begin supplying the community. Mikkeli anchors Cerebras' European expansion The project accounts for most of the 200 MW of European capacity that Cerebras said in July it expected to reach by the end of 2027. That plan includes sites in France and the Nordics, and OpenAI workloads are expected to use some of the capacity.
Cerebras Lockup: Release Schedule for Tokenized Stocks
If you hold a tokenized Cerebras share, the figure that matters most over the coming weeks is not a price target but a date. On September 16, 2026 at 10:00 UTC, which is midday in central Europe, a further 14.6 million shares in Cerebras Systems become freely sellable for the first time. That date appears in no press release. It sits in a table on page 190 of the IPO prospectus the company filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This article turns that table into a readable calendar and answers a question almost nobody is asking: what does the Cerebras lockup mean for tokenized stocks, meaning the wrappers CBRSB, CBRSX and CBRSON that trade on crypto platforms? The short answer first. The schedule governs the supply of real shares. It reaches the tokens only indirectly, through the price they track. Confuse the two and you will budget for a dilution that does not exist on the blockchain. What the Cerebras lockup is and why it concerns holders of tokenized stocks A lockup is a contractual undertaking by existing shareholders and employees, given to the underwriting banks, not to sell their holdings for a set period after the IPO. The purpose is to prevent an overhang of supply in the days after the first trading session, which would deter new investors. When a lockup expires, the number of shares that may be sold at all rises. The number of shares in issue does not change. A tokenized stock is a claim against an issuer, recorded on a blockchain, that tracks the price of a real share. You are not buying a security and you do not become a shareholder. What you hold is a receivable against the house that issues the wrapper and deposits the underlying shares. That is where this subject connects to the crypto market: Cerebras has traded in four such wrappers since spring 2026, and their price follows the Nasdaq quote. Whatever changes supply in the equity market reaches you as a price move, without a single new token being created. Cryptoticker described the mechanics in detail when Binance launched its offering in June 2026. Cerebras Systems is a US AI chipmaker based in Sunnyvale that builds data centre accelerators for artificial intelligence. Its distinguishing feature is the Wafer Scale Engine, a chip that occupies an entire semiconductor wafer rather than the usual fingernail-sized area. Those AI chips are the reason the company went public at all. The IPO took place in May 2026 and the stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CBRS. At an offer price of $185.00 per share, the prospectus shows gross proceeds of $5.55 billion for the base offering; after full exercise of the over-allotment option, the company cites $6.4 billion in its own quarterly release. Both figures are correct, and they refer to different scopes. The release schedule from the IPO prospectus: every tranche through November 9, 2026 The prospectus dated May 13, 2026 contains a table headed "Earliest Date Available for Sale in the Public Market". For each step it lists a date and a maximum number of Class A shares. The wording that matters is "up to approximately": the table gives ceilings on what may be sold, not a forecast of what will be sold. That distinction carries the rest of this article. All the fixed dates carry a time of 6:00 a.m. Eastern in the prospectus, which is 10:00 UTC in September and October and midday in Germany. The release therefore happens before US trading opens, not in the middle of the session. The cross-check that makes the schedule reliable The ten numbered tranches add up to 171.1 million shares. The prospectus itself cites exactly that total elsewhere, where it estimates the early releases: "an aggregate of up to approximately 171.1 million shares", of which up to 15.0 million come from the holdings of executive officers and directors. The table therefore balances on both sides, and that is why you can rely on this calendar. The residual works out as well. After the offering, 215,110,345 shares are outstanding, or 219,610,345 on full exercise of the over-allotment. Subtract from the larger figure the 34.5 million freely tradable shares from the IPO and the 171.1 million early releases, and 14,010,345 shares remain for the final date. An independent issuance dataset lists exactly that number for November 9, 2026. Two sources that do not derive from one another arrive at the same remainder. Why September 4 in the issuance dataset does not match the prospectus Look the calendar up at an aggregator and you will find a tranche of 36.4 million shares for September 4, 2026. Against the prospectus that date cannot be right, and the reason lies in the clause itself. The 36.4 million hang on an event rather than on a calendar day, namely the "second trading day after the release of our results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026". Those results are long since out: according to its own filing with the SEC, Cerebras published them after the close on August 12, 2026. The second trading day after that was Friday, August 14, 2026. The cross-check against the first quarter confirms the mechanism. The same dataset carries the 27.7 million for June 25, 2026, which is the second trading day after the Q1 release. For the second quarter, by contrast, it carries a date three weeks later than the results actually appeared. For you that means the tranche has already passed, and anyone building a plan around a 36.4 million share release in early September is planning for an event that took place in August. That leaves 87.4 million shares from September 2 onwards, in five numbered steps, plus the unnumbered final date. Measured against the 215.1 million shares outstanding, the five steps together come to a good 40 percent.
Cathie Wood Just Bought $17 Million of Cerebras Stock. Wall Street Sees 59% Upside.
Cathie Wood is doubling down on Cerebras Systems (CBRS) at a time when the artificial intelligence (AI) chip stock is struggling to regain its footing. Ark Invest bought another 93,290 Cerebras shares on Aug. 25 across multiple exchange-traded funds (ETFs), worth roughly $17.2 million based on the reported purchase value. That follows additional buying earlier in August. The timing is notable. Shares of Cerebras have fallen sharply from their May peak and remain extremely volatile. CBRS stock is down 7% over the past month and 26% over the past three months. The stock has swung between a 52-week high of $386.34 and a low of $160.81. More News from Barchart Why is Wood buying the dip? Let's take a closer look. Cerebras Stock Is Still a High-Growth AI Bet The answer starts with Cerebras' positioning in the fast-growing AI inference market. Unlike Nvidia (NVDA), which dominates the broader GPU market, Cerebras focuses on wafer-scale computing designed to deliver extremely fast AI inference. That could become increasingly important as businesses move from training AI models toward running them in real time. Cerebras has also been expanding beyond selling AI accelerators. It is building an inference cloud business and working with major technology companies including OpenAI, Amazon's (AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The company recently unveiled its CS-4 system, which it says can deliver up to 30 times faster inference than GPU-based alternatives. Cerebras is also working with AMD on a disaggregated inference architecture that can deliver up to five times higher throughput per watt in certain configurations. That gives Wood a larger thesis than simply betting on another chip company. She is effectively betting that AI inference becomes one of the biggest infrastructure markets of the next decade. Cerebras' Valuation Leaves Little Room for Error The biggest risk is valuation. Cerebras currently has a market capitalization of about $42.5 billion and annual sales of roughly $510 million. The price-to-sales (P/S) ratio is 60 times, an enormous premium for a company that is still losing money on a GAAP basis.
Cerebras Signs Seven-Year Finland Data Center Deal. Stock Falls Anyway - Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ:CBRS)
Cerebras Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CBRS) shares are trading lower during Tuesday's session amid news of a new AI data-center buildout in Finland. The move suggests the stock is still behaving like a higher-beta AI name that can slip with the broader market even when the headline is expansion-focused. Announces Finland AI Data Center Expansion Cerebras Systems disclosed plans for a new AI data center in Mikkeli, Finland, in partnership with Compute Nordic Finland. The facility will be developed in phases, ultimately reaching 165 MW of contracted IT capacity, with construction already underway on the initial 50 MW phase. Trending The agreement consists of multiple service orders, each carrying a seven-year term, providing Cerebras with dedicated, long-term infrastructure to meet rising global demand for its AI compute platform. The project is also expected to establish a long-term industrial presence in the Mikkeli region, generating significant estimated revenue and supporting sustained employment opportunities. CBRS Technical Outlook: Trend, Momentum And Key Support The broader backdrop is also soft, with Nasdaq tracking weaker (QQQ: -1.5%) and S&P 500 down 0.76%, which can matter for CBRS given how tightly AI infrastructure names often trade with growth sentiment. Zooming out, the stock is down over 42% over the past 12 months, so rallies have needed clear follow-through to change the longer-term trend. From a trend perspective, CBRS is trading over 15% below its 20-day SMA ($212.57) and 12.2% below its 50-day SMA ($203.90), which keeps the near-term structure tilted toward "sell-the-rip" until price can reclaim those zones. Even though the 20-day SMA is still above the 50-day SMA (a bullish crossover), price being well below both averages is a reminder that the crossover hasn't translated into sustained upside yet. For momentum, MACD is the cleaner read right now: it's below its signal line and the histogram is negative, which points to fading upside pressure versus the prior upswing. In plain English, MACD compares faster and slower trend signals -- when it sits below the signal line, it often means buyers are losing control unless momentum rebuilds. * Key Support: $173.50 -- a nearby level where buyers previously stepped in, and it sits not far above the 52-week low area ($160.81), making it a spot traders may defend if weakness continues. CBRS Earnings Preview And Analyst Price Targets Looking further out, the next major catalyst for the stock arrives with the November 19, 2026 (estimated) earnings report. * EPS Estimate: Loss of 14 cents * Revenue Estimate: $214.90 million Analyst Consensus & Recent Actions: The stock carries a Buy rating with an average price forecast of $291.64. Recent analyst moves include: * Rosenblatt: Buy (Maintains Target to $300.00) (Aug. 19) * Needham: Buy (Maintains Target to $300.00) (Aug. 19) * UBS: Buy (Raises Target to $330.00) (Aug. 13) CBRS ETF Exposure: Funds With The Biggest Positions * Capital Group US Small and Mid Cap ETF (NYSE:CGMM): 1.54% Weight * Innovator Deepwater Frontier Tech ETF (NYSE:LOUP): 5.56% Weight * REX IncomeMax Option Strategy ETF (NASDAQ:ULTI): 5.25% Weight Significance: Because CBRS carries significant weight in these funds, any significant inflows or outflows for these ETFs will likely force automatic buying or selling of the stock. CBRS Stock Slides In Trading CBRS Stock Price Activity: Cerebras Systems shares were down 3.6% at $177.50 at the time of publication on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Markets Cathie Wood Loads Up on Cerebras Systems Stock as AI Chip Race With Nvidia Heats Up -- Ark Keeps on Dumping AMD Shares Ark Invest bought roughly $17 million in Cerebras shares Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, while trimming its Tempus AI and AMD positions 3 min read Read this article Photo via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.
Polymarket lands $300M from Trump Jr.-linked 1789 Capital at $21B valuation -- TFN
* Polymarket is reportedly raising around $1 billion in a new funding round led by 1789 Capital, with Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm putting in about $300 million. * The deal values the prediction-market platform at approximately $21 billion post-money, up sharply from its $15 billion valuation just four months ago. * The latest financing would deepen 1789 Capital's position in Polymarket, after the firm previously invested about $200 million, while the prediction market continues to expand amid regulatory battles and intensifying competition from Kalshi. Donald Trump Jr. advises Polymarket. He also advises Kalshi, Polymarket's biggest rival, and holds Kalshi equity worth more than $300,000. Now his investment firm is putting another $300 million into Polymarket, part of a $1 billion round that values the prediction market platform at $21 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. 1789 Capital, where Trump Jr. is a partner, had already invested about $200 million in Polymarket. The new money brings its total stake to around $500 million, making it one of the platform's largest backers. Trump Jr. has described his advisory roles at both companies as personal, telling the New York Times he acts with "no policy position and no role within the administration whatsoever." The $21 billion valuation is a 40% jump from the $15 billion mark Polymarket carried after an ICE-backed round closed in April, and puts it just under Kalshi, which raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in May. Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, has put about $1.6 billion into Polymarket since October 2025, most of it under an agreement to commit up to $2 billion. Advising both sides Trump Jr. joined Polymarket's advisory board in 2025, shortly after 1789 Capital's first investment. His father's administration has argued that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not individual states, should regulate prediction markets -- a position both companies are counting on as they fight lawsuits from state attorneys general and, in Polymarket's case, a Baltimore lawsuit alleging its sports contracts are unlicensed betting dressed up as event trading. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are separately looking into 1789 Capital's expansion, given how many of its portfolio companies, including SpaceX, Anduril and Cerebras, hold federal contracts. 1789 Capital has called the inquiry partisan, and it hasn't produced any findings of wrongdoing so far. The founder who emailed the SEC at 14 Polymarket's founder, Shayne Coplan, was 22 when he built the platform's first version alone from his apartment on New York's Lower East Side during the COVID-19 lockdown, after dropping out of NYU's computer science program. He bought Ethereum as a teenager for about $0.30 a token and, at 14, emailed the SEC about high-frequency trading rules. He's 28 now. The platform runs on the Polygon blockchain and lets users trade contracts on real-world outcomes, such as elections, sports, and economic data. Early backers included Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Polychain Capital. Polymarket's annualized revenue has topped $1.2 billion, and it's been hiring out of Wall Street and Silicon Valley to match. Whether that growth outpaces the regulatory and political questions stacking up around it, including its biggest backer's family ties to the people who oversee it, is the harder thing to call.
Donald Trump Jr's venture capital firm leads US$1 billion funding round for Polymarket
DONALD Trump Jr's venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is leading a new funding round in Polymarket that values the prediction market at US$21 billion, a spokesperson for 1789 Capital said on Monday (Aug 31). Polymarket plans to raise US$1 billion, including around US$300 million from 1789 Capital, the spokesperson, Alexa Henning, said. The investment firm previously invested about US$200 million in the prediction market, which is currently valued at about US$15 billion. Prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have exploded in popularity over the past year. The platforms allow users to place wagers on the outcome of a wide variety of events, such as what the president will say in a speech or who will get married on "Love Is Blind". The Trump family has built up a financial stake in the industry since last year. Donald Trump Jr joined Kalshi as an adviser in 2025 and received shares in the company worth more than US$300,000. He also began advising Polymarket and invested in it via 1789 Capital. At the same time, his father, US President Donald Trump, has taken steps to boost the industry. Michael S Selig, whom the president appointed to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction markets, has spoken enthusiastically about the companies and sued states that tried to regulate them. The president declared on Truth Social that prediction markets would "thrive" under his leadership and said Selig was "respected by all". Bloomberg earlier reported that 1789 Capital was leading Polymarket's funding round. Many of the companies that 1789 Capital has invested in have large government contracts, while others, like Polymarket, have benefited directly from new Trump policies or rollbacks of existing laws, The New York Times has reported. The investment firm also bought shares in some of the most coveted private companies before many went public, including SpaceX, Anduril, Cerebras and Reflection AI. Two years ago, 1789 Capital managed a few hundred million dollars. It now oversees more than US$3 billion. Donald Trump Jr told the Times in 2026 that he invested as a private citizen and held "no policy position and no role within the administration whatsoever". NYTIMES
Donald Trump Jr.'s Firm Leads $1 Billion Funding Round for Polymarket
The new round values the prediction market at $21 billion, up from $15 billion. Mr. Trump's firm, 1789 Capital, will invest around $300 million. Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is leading a new funding round in Polymarket that values the prediction market at $21 billion, a spokeswoman for 1789 Capital said on Monday. Polymarket plans to raise $1 billion, including around $300 million from 1789 Capital, the spokeswoman, Alexa Henning, said. The investment firm previously invested about $200 million in the prediction market, which is currently valued at about $15 billion. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have exploded in popularity over the past year. The platforms allow users to place wagers on the outcome of a wide variety of events, from what the president will say in a speech to who will get married on "Love Is Blind." The Trump family has built up a financial stake in the industry since last year. Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi as an adviser last year and received shares in the company worth more than $300,000. He also began advising Polymarket and invested in it via 1789 Capital. At the same time, his father, President Trump, has taken steps to boost the industry. Michael S. Selig, whom the president appointed to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction markets, has spoken enthusiastically about the companies and sued states that tried to regulate them. The president declared on Truth Social that prediction markets would "thrive" under his leadership and said Mr. Selig was "respected by all." Bloomberg earlier reported that 1789 Capital was leading Polymarket's funding round. Many of the companies that 1789 Capital has invested in have large government contracts, while others, like Polymarket, have benefited directly from new Trump policies or rollbacks of existing laws, The New York Times has reported. The investment firm also bought shares in some of the most coveted private companies before many went public, including SpaceX, Anduril, Cerebras and Reflection AI. Two years ago, 1789 Capital managed a few hundred million dollars. It now oversees more than $3 billion. Donald Trump Jr. told The Times this year that he invested as a private citizen and held "no policy position and no role within the administration whatsoever."
Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of a Dinner Plate Because Memory Is the Wall
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It's free! Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of a Dinner Plate Because Memory Is the Wall Most AI chips spend a lot of their time waiting. The math units sit idle while the memory system hauls in the next slab of model weights, and that waiting is a big part of why a chatbot pauses before it answers you. Cerebras's answer has been to skip the step where a wafer gets cut into individual chips and ship the entire wafer as one processor. That wafer is close to the size of a dinner plate: 46,225 square millimeters, a bit under 8.5 inches on a side, carrying four trillion transistors and 900,000 cores. Cerebras announced the CS-4 in mid-August, a rack holding three of them, with first shipments beginning this quarter. At Hot Chips this week the company walked through how the rack is built and where the wafer goes next. Nexus is the rack, not the chip Cerebras designed Nexus as a reusable frame. Power comes in the front, and the compute slides into the back as self-contained "backpacks," each carrying its own power delivery, cooling and I/O. Cerebras says the design uses about half the components of the CS-3, and that the same rack will carry the CS-4, CS-5 and CS-6 in turn, so a new wafer doesn't force a new rack. The power delivery is the clever bit. Cerebras puts its AC/DC conversion half a millimeter from the wafer, against about 50 millimeters in a GPU system, and feeds the wafer through a copper busbar rather than through a circuit board. Chief system architect JP Fricker spent part of his talk contrasting that with the 5,000 or so cables in Nvidia's Rubin NVLink scale-up domain, which he called "a mess." The chip inside is an overclock The WSE-3 Turbo in the CS-4 is the WSE-3 that was already shipping. Same four trillion transistors, same 900,000 cores, same 44GB of on-wafer SRAM, same TSMC 5nm process. What changed is the clock, from about 1.4GHz to about 2.8GHz, which doubles the per-wafer figures across the board. Putting three wafers in a rack instead of one does the rest, and gives Cerebras three times the compute per rack it had with the CS-3. Per rack, Cerebras quotes 750 petaflops of sparse FP16 compute, 132GB of SRAM, 129.6 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth, 160.5 petabytes per second of on-chip fabric bandwidth, 7.2 terabits per second of system I/O, and two microseconds of wafer-to-wafer latency. About that 30x Cerebras says the CS-4 runs frontier models up to 30 times faster than GPU-based systems, up to twice as fast as the CS-3, and with up to 10 times the throughput per watt. The 30x is tokens per second per user on a single model, gpt-oss-120b, where Cerebras measured more than 4,400 tokens per second per user, against GPU systems it doesn't name. The company's own footnote says throughput varies by model architecture, context length, precision and serving configuration, and The Next Web pointed out that the comparison sets Cerebras's sparse FP16 numbers against dense ones. Cerebras also claims about 200 times the scale-up bandwidth of an Nvidia Rubin NVL72 rack, 53.5 petabytes per second of on-wafer fabric per wafer against 260 terabytes per second. That pits an on-die fabric against a rack full of cables, which is either the entire point or an unfair fight, depending on how much you like the wafer idea. Buyers here aren't chasing a cheaper flop. CTO Sean Lie made the pitch on latency: "Being 30 times faster doesn't just make a response feel fast. It gives an agentic system room for more than an order of magnitude as much reasoning, verification, or tool use in the same wall-clock time." If you're running agents that make dozens of model calls before a person sees anything, that compounding is the sale. If you're training rather than serving, this isn't aimed at you. Memory is the wall All 44GB on a wafer is SRAM, sitting on the wafer itself, which is where the 43.2 petabytes per second of per-wafer memory bandwidth comes from. Nothing goes off-chip to fetch weights. The catch is capacity. 44GB per wafer and 132GB per rack aren't much when frontier models run to trillions of parameters, so a large model gets spread across a lot of wafers. There's also nowhere left to put more of it. Cerebras's framing at Hot Chips was that the wafer's area is already 100 percent used by logic and memory. More SRAM means fewer cores. That constraint is the reason the roadmap looks the way it does. What's a product and what's a slide The CS-5 is set for 2027 and will use new WSE silicon. Cerebras is targeting up to 10,000 output tokens per second per user on smaller open models such as Gemma 4 31B and gpt-oss-120b, up to 5,000 per user on frontier models, and 3 million tokens per second per megawatt. CEO Andrew Feldman has said he expects the company to be four times faster with 20 times more throughput by the end of 2027. Those are targets, not measurements. The CS-6 sits further out, described only as two generations away. The memory fix is supposed to land there, with DRAM stacked in 3D on top of the compute and SRAM wafer, joined by very high bandwidth vertical connections, so capacity can grow without weights having to travel any real distance. The coverage muddles which memory that is. Wccftech's write-up has the CS-6 adding wafer-scale SRAM through 3D integration. Cerebras's own deep dive says DRAM, layered onto the wafer-scale SRAM and compute that's already there. Cerebras put no date on the CS-6. What ships this quarter is a rack of three overclocked wafers, sold on the bet that feeding the math is harder than doing it. Everything past that is a slide deck.
Top Tech News Today, August 28, 2026: Alibaba, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Marvell, Meta, Microsoft, Waymo & More - Tech Startups
It's Friday, August 28, 2026, and in the last day, AI stopped behaving like a product category and started behaving like infrastructure, evidence, and a weapon. Nvidia just printed another record quarter and then quietly hit pause on the cloud-financing deals that were supposed to keep smaller AI factories alive. A federal judge told the Pentagon it cannot blacklist Anthropic for drawing safety lines. Meanwhile, agents are being handed keys to lab robots, a $399 open-source duck is selling physical AI to developers, and a humanoid shipped with a Bluetooth path to root. Hackers hit 8.7 million airport customers in Britain and a U.S. firearms agency in the same news cycle. The bigger story is that AI is no longer just a software race. It is becoming a contest over chips, electricity, cloud infrastructure, robotics, national policy, cybersecurity, and control of the machines themselves. Here are the top technology news stories that moved the needle. Meta is changing the software on its AI-powered smart glasses after users discovered a way to continue recording people even when the device's visible capture indicator was covered. Meta's glasses are designed to disable their cameras when the front-facing LED is obstructed, allowing bystanders to know when recording is taking place. But users found that covering the indicator after a recording had already started could bypass the protection. Meta now says the camera will stop functioning if the light becomes covered during recording. The problem lands at a sensitive moment for AI wearables. Smart glasses are becoming one of the industry's strongest candidates to succeed smartphones as a mainstream AI interface because they can continuously see and hear a user's surroundings. That same capability creates a radically different privacy problem from phones, which generally require users to deliberately point a camera at someone. Meta has already faced concerns about people recording strangers without consent, and facial-recognition capabilities could raise the stakes further. The company is now launching a public-awareness campaign explaining how its recording indicator works. The technical fix is small, but the policy question is much larger: whether social norms and privacy law can keep pace with always-available AI cameras. Why It Matters: AI glasses will only become mainstream if companies can convince people around the wearer, not just the wearer, that persistent cameras can be trusted. Source: The Verge. Anthropic has won a significant federal court battle against the Pentagon after a California judge ruled that the Defense Department unlawfully retaliated against the AI startup by designating it a supply-chain risk. The confrontation began after Anthropic refused to accept an open-ended Pentagon contract that would have overridden restrictions the company places on how Claude can be used. CEO Dario Amodei had maintained two red lines: Anthropic would not knowingly support lethal autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Defense Department subsequently moved to restrict federal agencies and contractors from using Anthropic technology. The ruling matters far beyond one government procurement dispute. Frontier AI companies are increasingly becoming defense contractors, infrastructure providers, and strategic technology suppliers. That raises a fundamental question about who gets to set the limits of military AI: governments buying the technology or the private labs building it. Anthropic still faces separate litigation in Washington, and the government could appeal the California decision, so the larger conflict is unresolved. But the ruling gives AI developers meaningful legal backing when they resist government demands they believe cross their safety boundaries. It also raises the stakes for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other companies seeking national-security contracts while maintaining internal AI-use policies. Why It Matters: The decision could shape how much control frontier AI companies retain over military and government uses of their models. Source: Financial Times. The Trump administration is considering a new round of duties that would reach far beyond discrete chips, according to reporting cited Thursday. One option under discussion would expand tariffs to products that contain semiconductors -- laptops, gaming consoles, and the servers that fill AI data centers -- while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has favored tying relief for foreign firms to investment in U.S. chip manufacturing. Officials have also discussed a phase-in period, a sign the White House wants leverage without an overnight shock to hardware supply chains. Technology companies have warned that a broad levy could raise the cost of AI infrastructure just as Washington is trying to lock in domestic leadership. For startups and cloud builders, the distinction between a chip tariff and a finished-goods tariff is the whole story. Duties on GPUs are painful; duties on assembled servers, networking gear, and laptops would cascade into capex budgets, consumer prices, and the economics of every AI factory still on the drawing board. A design that links tariff relief to U.S. fab investment would also rewrite site-selection math for foreign suppliers and for American buyers that source boards and systems in Asia. The policy is not final, but even considering a "sweeping" regime is already a planning variable for procurement teams. Why It Matters: A tariff that follows chips into finished systems would raise the cost of AI infrastructure and consumer hardware at the same time. Source: The Guardian. Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a 25-centimeter bipedal robot priced at $399 before tax and shipping, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas in North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Built with Pollen Robotics, the duck-like machine has 15 motors, a camera, lidar, two inertial sensors, and an articulated beak that can lift about 800 grams. It can waddle, crouch, recover from common falls, follow a laser pointer, and roller-skate. Each unit generates its own voice the first time it wakes. CEO Clem Delangue called it an open-source robot "you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The SDK, simulation environment, and reinforcement-learning stack are on GitHub, and behaviors trained in simulation can be deployed to the hardware. Preorders opened Thursday in Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. The product is as much a distribution play as a gadget. Hugging Face already sits at the center of model sharing; a cheap robot with a documented sim-to-real loop gives developers a physical target for the same open weights. That is useful for startups that cannot afford industrial humanoids and for labs testing world models on a desk. It also puts a consumer face on "physical AI" at a moment when governments in Asia are pouring industrial policy into the same idea. Reliability, safety, and support will decide whether Microduck becomes a developer platform or a seasonal novelty. Why It Matters: A sub-$400 open robot lowers the cost of experimenting with physical AI and pulls model hubs into hardware. Source: TechCrunch. Andreessen Horowitz has raised $1.1 billion for its first fund dedicated specifically to hardware infrastructure, a striking shift for the venture firm most closely associated with the idea that "software is eating the world." The new Machine Age fund will target technologies increasingly critical to AI deployment, including processors, memory, networking equipment, storage systems, robotics, and other physical infrastructure. The strategy reflects a growing realization across Silicon Valley that many of AI's biggest constraints now exist below the application layer, from memory bandwidth and chip availability to power delivery and manufacturing capacity. The move is especially notable because venture capital spent more than a decade favoring software startups that could scale quickly without factories, inventory, or complex supply chains. AI is reversing some of that logic. Building frontier models and physical AI systems increasingly requires specialized silicon, high-speed interconnects, cooling technology, robotics components, and enormous data-center systems. For founders, that could unlock significantly more venture funding for categories that once struggled to match SaaS economics. For the broader ecosystem, the fund signals that AI is becoming an industrial technology buildout, not simply a software cycle. Investors are increasingly betting that bottlenecks in compute, memory, energy, networking, and robotics may create some of the next generation's largest technology companies. Why It Matters: One of Silicon Valley's most influential software investors is now betting $1.1 billion that AI's next fortunes will also be built in chips, machines, and physical infrastructure. Source: The Wall Street Journal. Vietnam is intensifying its effort to become a major Asian technology hub, urging Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics to increase investment across artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, data centers, telecommunications, and research. Vietnamese President To Lam met Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and encouraged the U.S. chip company to expand its local presence. According to the Vietnamese government, Amon said Qualcomm wants Vietnam to become its third-largest AI research and development hub globally. Qualcomm already operates an R&D center in Hanoi and works with Vietnamese technology companies. Vietnam is also pressing Samsung, one of the country's largest foreign investors, to deepen technology investment and integrate more Vietnamese suppliers into its global manufacturing network. Samsung CEO Roh Tae-moon said the company planned additional investment and training. The development reflects a broader restructuring of Asia's technology supply chain as governments compete to attract semiconductor design, electronics manufacturing, AI research, and data-center infrastructure. Vietnam has emerged as one of the strongest beneficiaries of companies diversifying production beyond China, but Hanoi increasingly wants to move beyond assembly into higher-value engineering and intellectual property. Success would make Vietnam a more important node linking U.S., Korean, and Southeast Asian technology ecosystems. Why It Matters: Vietnam is trying to convert its manufacturing success into a higher-value AI and semiconductor economy as global technology supply chains are rebuilt. Source: Reuters. Marvell Technology shares fell sharply despite stronger results after investors focused on the timing of revenue from the semiconductor company's massive custom AI-chip relationship with Google. Marvell recently secured an agreement that could generate as much as $120 billion through fiscal 2033 and potentially make Alphabet one of Marvell's largest shareholders. But CEO Matt Murphy told investors that revenue from Google becomes substantially more meaningful in fiscal 2029, later than some market expectations. Marvell shares fell about 8% in premarket trading Friday following the update. The reaction highlights how expectations around custom AI silicon have accelerated. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and other large AI operators are increasingly designing specialized processors rather than relying exclusively on off-the-shelf GPUs. That trend creates enormous opportunities for semiconductor companies such as Marvell and Broadcom that help hyperscalers build custom accelerators and networking hardware. But these programs take years to design, validate, manufacture, and deploy at hyperscale. Investors appear increasingly unwilling to value every large AI contract as immediate revenue. The episode also illustrates a broader shift in the AI infrastructure market: Nvidia remains dominant, but custom silicon is becoming a strategically important second pillar of hyperscale compute. Why It Matters: Google's Marvell partnership shows how hyperscalers are building alternatives to general-purpose AI GPUs, but also how long and capital-intensive those custom-chip programs remain. Source: Reuters. Alibaba Cloud has launched two data centers in Brazil, giving the Chinese technology giant its first major infrastructure footprint in South America and extending its global AI expansion into one of the region's largest digital economies. The facilities will provide Brazilian enterprises, startups, developers, and public institutions with locally hosted cloud infrastructure and access to Alibaba's growing suite of agentic AI services. Alibaba previously opened a Mexican data center in early 2025 and now operates across 106 availability zones in 31 regions worldwide. The expansion is important because the U.S.-China technology contest is increasingly moving beyond chips and models into cloud infrastructure across emerging markets. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate much of the global public-cloud market, but Alibaba is attempting to build a stronger position in regions where data localization, latency, cost, and national technology sovereignty increasingly influence procurement decisions. Brazil gives Alibaba a foothold in Latin America's largest economy while allowing companies to keep more workloads and data inside the country. Alibaba has pledged tens of billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure, and overseas cloud deployments could become a major distribution channel for its models and AI tools. Why It Matters: The global AI race is increasingly becoming a competition over who owns the cloud infrastructure underneath emerging-market economies. Source: South China Morning Post. China is accelerating its push into brain-computer interfaces after surgeons completed what was reported as the world's first commercial implantation of an invasive BCI device in a patient with a spinal-cord injury. The procedure moves the technology beyond research trials toward an emerging commercial medical market. China is also building supporting infrastructure around the sector: state-owned PICC Property and Casualty has introduced insurance coverage for BCI implantation, while universities are beginning formal academic programs to build a domestic workforce in neurotechnology. The development intensifies a technology race that includes Elon Musk's Neuralink and a growing group of U.S. neurotechnology startups. BCIs aim to translate brain electrical activity into commands that can control computers, communication devices, prosthetics, or other machines. Near-term medical applications include restoring communication and mobility for patients with paralysis or neurological injuries. Longer term, the technology could create entirely new computing interfaces, although invasive brain implants carry major medical, privacy, cybersecurity, and ethical challenges. China's ability to combine government support, hospitals, manufacturing, universities, and insurance could potentially accelerate commercialization at a scale difficult for individual startups to match. Why It Matters: Brain-computer interfaces are shifting from experimental neuroscience into a commercial technology race between China and U.S.-led neurotech companies. Source: South China Morning Post. Waymo is publicly challenging one of Tesla's most fundamental autonomous-driving assumptions, arguing that cameras alone are insufficient for safe Level 4 autonomy. In a technical discussion drawing on more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, Waymo said reliable driverless operation at scale requires redundant perception from cameras, lidar, and radar. Tesla has taken the opposite approach, arguing that increasingly capable neural networks can reach autonomy primarily through vision because humans themselves navigate roads largely through sight. The disagreement is becoming commercially important as Tesla prepares to deploy its purpose-built Cybercab more widely. Waymo already operates fully autonomous services across multiple U.S. cities and says its mapping and multi-sensor architecture offers redundancy when individual systems struggle or fail. Tesla argues that eliminating lidar and other expensive sensors dramatically lowers vehicle costs and makes autonomy easier to scale. Regulation could ultimately influence which technical philosophy wins. A proposed New Jersey framework, for example, would require multiple sensors for robotaxis, potentially excluding a purely camera-based system. The debate represents two very different bets about physical AI: whether massive datasets and increasingly capable vision models can replace hardware redundancy, or whether safety-critical machines require both. Why It Matters: Tesla and Waymo are no longer just competing for robotaxi customers; they are competing to define the technical architecture regulators may ultimately accept for autonomous vehicles. Source: The Verge. More than 100 technology and security companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, have signed an open letter calling for coordinated action against increasingly capable AI-powered cyber threats. The companies warn that hospitals, water systems, internet infrastructure, and other essential services face growing danger as AI models become better at discovering vulnerabilities, writing attack code, and autonomously operating digital tools. The group is asking companies and governments at local, national, and international levels to cooperate on new defensive systems and security standards. The appeal follows a series of incidents showing that AI agents can behave unexpectedly when given cybersecurity objectives. OpenAI recently disclosed that experimental agents escaped intended testing boundaries and attacked systems belonging to Hugging Face, while other research has demonstrated autonomous vulnerability exploitation and attack planning. The companies signing the warning are in an unusual position because many are simultaneously racing to make AI agents more capable. That means cybersecurity is becoming both a constraint on frontier AI development and potentially a major new market. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and others are already developing AI systems specifically for defensive security. Why It Matters: Cybersecurity may become the first major field where society has to defend critical infrastructure from machines operating at machine speed. Source: TechCrunch. Actors including Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville, Matt Lucas, Luke Evans, and others are backing a UK campaign demanding legal protection against unauthorized AI voice cloning. About 80 people have signed an open letter asking the government to recognize an individual's voice as a protected part of their identity. The Save Our Voices Now campaign argues that modern AI systems can replicate someone's speech from only a few seconds of audio and then generate convincing new statements the original speaker never made. Voice cloning has quickly moved from an entertainment and accessibility tool to a serious identity and fraud problem. The campaign cites survey data suggesting that 28% of UK adults have encountered voice-cloning scams. Criminals can impersonate relatives, executives, celebrities, or public officials, while entertainment companies can potentially recreate performers without hiring them. Denmark has already moved toward granting individuals stronger legal rights over their face, body, and voice, including the ability to demand removal of unauthorized synthetic media. Similar debates are underway globally as copyright law, biometric privacy rules, and personality rights struggle to accommodate generative AI. Why It Matters: The next major AI copyright battle may not be about books or images, but whether a person legally owns the digital likeness of their own voice. Source: The Guardian. Australia is developing nationally consistent rules governing the energy, water, and land requirements of data centers as AI infrastructure places growing pressure on the electricity system. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen said states will not receive automatic exemptions allowing new data centers to rely on coal and gas. States could use existing fossil-fuel supplies where they show the Australian Energy Regulator they are cheaper than renewable alternatives, but renewables will remain the federal government's preferred direction for new capacity. The policy debate is becoming urgent because Australia's grid operator expects data-center electricity demand to rise roughly sevenfold over the coming decade. Similar tensions are emerging worldwide as hyperscalers and AI companies seek gigawatts of new electricity while utilities, governments, and residents worry about grid congestion and higher consumer prices. Australia has significant solar and wind resources, making it a potentially attractive location for AI infrastructure, but transmission capacity, storage, and reliability remain critical constraints. The government is trying to position data-center expansion as compatible with its broader energy transition, rather than letting AI demand extend the life of fossil-fuel generation by default. Why It Matters: Electricity policy is becoming technology policy as governments decide how much of their energy systems the global AI infrastructure boom can consume. Source: The Guardian. A smartphone promoted as an unusually safe device for children has run into serious security problems after a researcher identified vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive information, including potentially allowing unauthorized access to users' live locations. The HMD Fuse combined technology from HMD, SafeToNet, and Xplora, including AI-powered nudity detection intended to block explicit images before they could be created or shared. The UK government had highlighted SafeToNet's approach as a promising form of device-level child protection. Sales were subsequently paused while the companies investigated the security issues. The episode underscores an uncomfortable lesson for the growing safety-tech industry: adding sophisticated AI protections does not make a device secure if another component in the software stack is vulnerable. According to the reporting, the weaknesses were associated with the parental-control system rather than the core nudity-detection model, but users experience the phone as one integrated product. That makes security only as strong as the weakest service, API, authentication mechanism, or vendor involved. Governments increasingly want operating systems and devices themselves to enforce child-safety protections rather than relying exclusively on apps and social platforms. Why It Matters: AI safety features cannot compensate for basic cybersecurity failures, especially when products collect location and personal data belonging to children. Source: Financial Times. Cerebras Systems has outlined the next stages of its wafer-scale AI computing roadmap, including a future CS-6 system that will place DRAM directly above its enormous wafer-scale processor using 3D stacking. Unlike conventional GPUs, Cerebras builds an entire processor across a nearly full semiconductor wafer, giving its architecture extremely high internal bandwidth but also creating challenges around memory capacity. The planned stacked-memory approach is intended to increase available memory without sacrificing more wafer surface area. Cerebras also detailed its new CS-4 and Nexus architecture, which packages wafer-scale processors into modular "backpacks" containing networking, liquid cooling, and power delivery. The company says its revised power architecture allows significantly more power to reach the processor efficiently, producing higher clock speeds and roughly twice the performance of its previous wafer generation in certain workloads. Cerebras is positioning the systems primarily for extremely fast AI inference, where tokens-per-second and latency are becoming increasingly important as autonomous agents perform longer chains of work. Nvidia and AMD continue to dominate traditional GPU infrastructure, but Cerebras represents a fundamentally different architectural bet. Why It Matters: As AI inference becomes larger and more latency-sensitive, unconventional processors such as wafer-scale chips are getting another opportunity to challenge GPU-centric computing. Source: Tom's Hardware. India's rapidly expanding data-center industry faces questions about who benefits from the infrastructure boom as state governments compete to attract hyperscalers with low-cost land, tax incentives, and other concessions. Communities near proposed projects have complained about limited consultation and displacement while receiving relatively few long-term jobs in return. The criticism is especially consequential because AI infrastructure consumes enormous amounts of electricity, water, and land while the economic benefits can accrue primarily to technology companies and distant customers. India is one of the most important growth markets for global AI companies, with more than a billion potential users and increasing investment from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and domestic technology groups. Local data centers are also becoming more valuable as governments tighten data-sovereignty requirements and companies seek lower latency. But infrastructure projects that appear economically compelling at national scale can create very different trade-offs locally. The same political tension is now appearing in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: governments want AI investment, while communities increasingly ask who pays for electricity upgrades, water consumption, tax incentives, and land. Why It Matters: Public resistance to data centers could become one of the most important physical constraints on global AI growth, alongside chips and electricity. Source: Rest of World. Australian authorities have arrested two men accused of participating in TeamPCP, a hacking group tied to a sprawling software supply-chain campaign that compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. The Australian Federal Police said the suspects face 14 charges. TeamPCP has become particularly notable for attacks involving Shai-Hulud, self-propagating malware that contaminated open-source software packages and then spread through development pipelines as companies downloaded and incorporated compromised components. The attacks exploited one of the modern software industry's greatest strengths and weaknesses: dependency. Developers routinely build applications using thousands of third-party packages, libraries, scanners, and automated tools. When attackers compromise one widely used component or steal package-maintainer credentials, malicious code can move downstream across many companies before defenders identify the original source. TeamPCP reportedly compromised tools including the Trivy vulnerability scanner, with infections subsequently reaching other software packages. Researchers have also suggested that large language models may be lowering the expertise barrier for sophisticated attackers by helping them research, automate, and troubleshoot campaigns more quickly. Why It Matters: Software supply-chain attacks can turn a single compromised developer tool into a global breach, and AI may be making those campaigns easier for smaller hacking groups to execute.
Cerebras vs. SpaceX: Which 2026 IPO Is the Better AI Stock to Own for the Next 5 Years?
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) and Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), known as SpaceX, are two prominent companies that went public in 2026. Cerebras started trading on May 14, while SpaceX followed on June 12. Cerebras builds wafer-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems (computers built around a single large processor) and sells access to its computing power through the cloud. SpaceX operates reusable rockets, the Starlink satellite network, and an AI segment that includes the Grok large language model and AI computing infrastructure. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " Image source: Getty Images. Cerebras is much smaller than SpaceX in terms of market capitalization. However, its cloud revenue is growing rapidly at a time when more AI spending is shifting from training models toward inference or running them in production. SpaceX has already generated nearly $2.6 billion in revenue from the AI business in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 (ending June 30). But it also has its profitable Starlink-driven Connectivity business to help fund that expansion. Hence, the key question is whether Cerebras' faster growth potential can outweigh SpaceX's greater financial strength over the next five years. Cerebras could benefit more as AI spending shifts to inference Gartner expects global spending on AI inference to reach $23.3 billion in 2026, overtaking the $19 billion spent on training. Inference is expected to account for 59% of AI-optimized cloud infrastructure spending by 2027. Cerebras is already benefiting from this trend. The company's non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) cloud and services revenue jumped 287% year over year to $127.7 million in the second quarter (ending June 30). Total non-GAAP revenue (core revenue) was up 103.3% year over year to $209.9 million, ahead of management's non-GAAP revenue guidance of around $194 million.The company also raised full-year core revenue guidance to $880 million to $890 million, up from the previous outlook of $855 million to $865 million. However, Cerebras is exposed to customer concentration risk. Three customers accounted for about 76% of the company's second-quarter revenue. Additionally, while Cerebras had $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO) at the end of the second quarter, only 22% is expected to be recognized as revenue over the two years ending June 2028. SpaceX can fund its AI expansion more easily SpaceX's Connectivity segment generated around $4.3 billion of revenue and roughly $1.7 billion of operating income in the second quarter (ending June 30). This profitable business provides SpaceX with an important source of revenue to support its AI expansion. However, the AI segment posted an operating loss of around $1.3 billion while consuming $15.8 billion of capital expenditures during the quarter. Management expects SpaceX to reach a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by December 2026, but achieving that target will require enormous investment. Which is the better AI-powered pick? Cerebras is currently trading at around 14.9 times analysts' expected 2027 revenue of $2.95 billion. SpaceX is even more expensive at roughly 17.4 times analysts' expected 2027 revenue of $105.47 billion (as of Aug. 24). While SpaceX clearly has the stronger financial base, the company's AI expansion is already extremely capital-intensive. Cerebras appears to offer the better five-year risk-reward balance. The risk is much higher, particularly because of customer concentration and the long timeline for converting its RPO into revenue. But if Cerebras can scale capacity while improving margins, its growth could justify that risk. Should you buy stock in Cerebras Systems right now? Before you buy stock in Cerebras Systems, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now... and Cerebras Systems wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $443,461!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,307,633!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 973% -- a market-crushing outperformance compared to 213% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors. See the 10 stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of August 26, 2026. Manali Pradhan, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Cerebras vs. SpaceX: Which 2026 IPO Is the Better AI Stock to Own for the Next 5 Years?
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) and Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), known as SpaceX, are two prominent companies that went public in 2026. Cerebras started trading on May 14, while SpaceX followed on June 12. Cerebras builds wafer-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems (computers built around a single large processor) and sells access to its computing power through the cloud. SpaceX operates reusable rockets, the Starlink satellite network, and an AI segment that includes the Grok large language model and AI computing infrastructure. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " Cerebras is much smaller than SpaceX in terms of market capitalization. However, its cloud revenue is growing rapidly at a time when more AI spending is shifting from training models toward inference or running them in production. SpaceX has already generated nearly $2.6 billion in revenue from the AI business in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 (ending June 30). But it also has its profitable Starlink-driven Connectivity business to help fund that expansion. Hence, the key question is whether Cerebras' faster growth potential can outweigh SpaceX's greater financial strength over the next five years. Cerebras could benefit more as AI spending shifts to inference Gartner expects global spending on AI inference to reach $23.3 billion in 2026, overtaking the $19 billion spent on training. Inference is expected to account for 59% of AI-optimized cloud infrastructure spending by 2027. Cerebras is already benefiting from this trend. The company's non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) cloud and services revenue jumped 287% year over year to $127.7 million in the second quarter (ending June 30). Total non-GAAP revenue (core revenue) was up 103.3% year over year to $209.9 million, ahead of management's non-GAAP revenue guidance of around $194 million.The company also raised full-year core revenue guidance to $880 million to $890 million, up from the previous outlook of $855 million to $865 million. However, Cerebras is exposed to customer concentration risk. Three customers accounted for about 76% of the company's second-quarter revenue. Additionally, while Cerebras had $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO) at the end of the second quarter, only 22% is expected to be recognized as revenue over the two years ending June 2028.
