Cerebras Backlog Hits $25.4 Billion, Largely Driven by OpenAI Deal

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at Splunk's .conf26 conference in Denver this week that the chipmaker is meeting only about 50% of what its customers are asking for, as demand for its processors has outrun its factories. Tan attributed the shortfall to an explosion in demand for central processing units to run artificial intelligence inference, work that leans on CPUs rather than the graphics chips that dominate AI headlines. The shortage is visible in Intel's results: revenue growth accelerated from 3% in the third quarter of 2025 to 7% in the first quarter of 2026 and 25% in the second quarter, when revenue reached $16.1 billion, while the data center and AI segment grew 59% to $6.3 billion and the client computing and physical AI segment grew 13%. Intel guided third-quarter revenue to between $15.8 billion and $16.8 billion, implying growth of about 19% at the midpoint, and its non-GAAP gross margin climbed from 29.7% a year ago to 41% in the first quarter of 2026 and 41.8% in the second quarter, with management expecting 42% in the third quarter. Chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said the company is meaningfully increasing investments in equipment, clean room space, and substrates, and Tan said the 18A process behind its new Panther Lake laptop chips is in high-volume production while its successor, 14A, begins production in the first quarter of 2027.

Cerebras Systems announced on September 1 a new AI data center in Mikkeli, Finland, built with partner Compute Nordic Finland, that will grow in stages to 165 MW of contracted capacity, with construction on the first 50 MW already under way. The deal runs through a series of service orders, each with a seven-year term, stepping up from 50 MW to 80 MW and eventually 165 MW, and an independent study dated September 12, 2025 put the eventual regional investment at €1.0 billion to €1.7 billion. Cerebras reported on August 12 that cloud revenue for the quarter ended June 30 rose 281% from a year earlier, with $25.4 billion in customer obligations still to be delivered, while core gross margin reached 41%, roughly 940 basis points above a year earlier. On a GAAP basis, second-quarter gross margin was 14% and operating margin was negative 265%, and even the core measure that strips out stock compensation, warrant amortization and pass-through data center costs showed an operating margin of negative 16%. For the third quarter, Cerebras guided to core operating margin between negative 25% and negative 23% on core revenue of $214 million to $216 million, while hedge fund ownership rose from zero funds to 78 and short interest sits at 11.88% of the float.

Xeal launched Laitent, which it calls the world's first edge inference compute network using idle EV charging capacity, tapping more than 200MW of permitted, installed electrical infrastructure across 1,600+ properties. Xeal, a member of NVIDIA Inception, plans to deploy over 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs alongside EV charging infrastructure, and has secured partnerships with Rafay Systems for AI infrastructure orchestration, Spectrum Business for dedicated enterprise-grade fiber, dozens of real estate and property managers, and a Tier 1 inference provider for up to 5MW of compute. The first Laitent Pod will be brought online with partner JVM Realty by the end of 2026. Each Laitent Pod is about the size of one parking space, contains up to 48 NVIDIA Hopper or Blackwell Ultra GPUs, requires no water hookup, and runs quiet at less than 65 decibels, offering sub-20ms latency in metro areas. Xeal said EV charging sites typically operate at less than 10% of permitted capacity, and it taps the remaining 90% for compute, with property owners able to add as much as $1m in property value for little-to-no upfront investment. Looking beyond the initial 200MW of installed charging capacity, Xeal plans to unlock over 1GW of existing headroom across real estate and EV charging deployments.