Cerebras Adds Microsoft as 3 Clients Make 79% of Its Revenue

Cerebras Systems has signed Microsoft as a customer, its third hyperscaler in six months, at a point when three customers make up 79% of its revenue. In the third quarter the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) accounted for 38%, OpenAI for 34% and G42 for 7%, according to the Form 10-Q Cerebras filed on 12 November; the 79% is our arithmetic.

The same three made up 79% of revenue in the first nine months, too (45%, 25% and 9%), by our arithmetic. Microsoft adds no revenue yet: chief executive Andrew Feldman told CNBC it signed in October and that “revenue begins to show up in Q1 ’27”.

Business Pill · Concentration

A short explainer on concentration: when a few big pieces make the total. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Cerebras.

What Cerebras Has Said About the Microsoft Deal

On the earnings call Feldman said: “We also signed an exciting deal with Microsoft, about which we will share more next year. That brings us to 3 hyperscaler wins in the last 6 months.” The other two are Amazon Web Services and Oracle, which is buying Cerebras hardware for its own data centers.

Asked by Barclays analyst Tom O’Malley for the relative size of the new deals, Feldman gave none. He said Cerebras would announce the Microsoft deal “in more detail in the first half of next year, and that’s when we can expect revenue to start from that transaction”.

The 10-Q adds the terms Cerebras has put in writing. It says Cerebras entered into commercial agreements with Oracle and Microsoft in the second half of 2026 “for the sale of hardware and cloud inference services, respectively”. It adds that the agreements “provide preferential commercial terms to these counterparties”, and that the Microsoft agreement “includes certain milestones that must be satisfied before cloud inference services commence”.

Three Customers, 79% of Revenue

The 10-Q lists the customers that each made up 10% or more of revenue. MBZUAI and G42 are related parties to each other under the accounting rules. A year earlier, MBZUAI was 70% of third-quarter revenue and G42 14%, together 84%, by our arithmetic. OpenAI, whose contract began in December 2025, is now the second-largest customer.

The same concentration shows in what Cerebras is owed: “two customers accounted for 80% of our accounts receivable balance” at 30 September, the 10-Q says. Our piece on the customer warrants covers what OpenAI, G42 and an Amazon entity hold in the company.

Chief financial officer Bob Komin said on the call that OpenAI’s contract “represents the majority of our reported RPO to date”, referring to the $26.1 billion of remaining performance obligations at 30 September. He said that figure “did not include the impact of new deals signed after September 30th, including Oracle, which is large”. Feldman told CNBC that Microsoft signed in October, so as we read those two statements, the Microsoft deal is not in the $26.1 billion either.

How the Stock Took It

Cerebras shares opened at $110.50 on Friday and reached $120.44 in the first five minutes of trading, against Thursday’s close of $97.75, Yahoo Finance data show. That high was 23.2% above the close. By 16:36 UTC the stock was at $105.49, up 7.9%, so it had given back about two-thirds of the early gain, by our arithmetic.

At 243.0 million shares outstanding across the three classes on the 10-Q cover, the $7.74 rise at 16:36 UTC is worth about $1.9 billion in market value, by our arithmetic. CNBC reported that the shares had fallen about 47% since the May listing before the results. Our results piece has the raised outlook and the backlog.

The Structural Read

As we read the 10-Q, the concentration has shifted rather than fallen: MBZUAI and G42 were 84% of revenue a year earlier, by our arithmetic, and OpenAI has since become the second-largest customer at 34%.

As we read Komin’s and Feldman’s remarks together, the $26.1 billion of remaining performance obligations, mostly OpenAI’s contract, does not yet include either the Oracle deal or the Microsoft deal.

Three Implications

FOR INVESTORS Cerebras gave no size for the Microsoft deal; Feldman said more details would come in the first half of 2027, when he expects revenue from it to start.

FOR CUSTOMERS The 10-Q says the Oracle and Microsoft agreements provide preferential commercial terms to those counterparties.

FOR OUR COVERAGE We will report the Microsoft deal terms when Cerebras or Microsoft discloses them.

The Business Engineer Lens

This story maps onto the Business Engineer framework The State of The Inference Economy.

The framework says: “Training was a cost center: episodic, concentrated among roughly twenty frontier model labs, amortizable across trillions of tokens. Inference is a revenue engine: continuous, distributed across millions of applications and agents, incurring marginal cost with every query.”

As we read the 10-Q, Cerebras’ customer list still looks like the training-era pattern the framework describes, with three customers at 79% of quarterly revenue by our arithmetic; the Microsoft agreement is for cloud inference services. The framework predates these filings and does not discuss Cerebras.

What Is Not Established

The 10-Q, the call and the CNBC interview give no value, length or capacity for the Microsoft agreement; Feldman said more details would come in the first half of 2027. We did not find a Microsoft statement on the deal in its news and Azure blog feeds when we checked on 13 November. The 10-Q does not say what the milestones are or what the preferential terms consist of.

The 79% shares are our sums of the percentages in the 10-Q; it does not give a combined figure. Whether Microsoft sits in the backlog is our reading of Komin’s and Feldman’s statements, not a company disclosure. Intraday prices can move after we wrote.

The Bottom Line

Cerebras has added Microsoft to Amazon and Oracle as hyperscaler customers. Feldman expects revenue from the deal to start in 2027, and the 10-Q discloses only preferential commercial terms and milestones before the cloud inference services commence. In the quarter to 30 September, MBZUAI, OpenAI and G42 accounted for 79% of revenue, by our arithmetic from the 10-Q.