Cerebras Shares Hit 52-Week Low After Microsoft Plans Maia Expansion

Cerebras Systems (CBRS) shares fell 10.69% Monday to a new 52-week low as Microsoft outlined plans to expand its in-house Maia systems and OpenAI left the hardware for GPT-6.1 Sol’s “Ultrafast” tier unspecified.

CBRS opened at $160.88, reached $161.20 and fell to $145.75 before ending at $146.62. Trading volume totaled 18,136,757 shares. The decline extended the stock’s slide below Cerebras’ $185 initial public offering price and set another post-IPO low.

Microsoft plans to increase Azure Maia deployments to multi-gigawatt capacity beginning in 2027. The company also said Maia will become the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services.

Maia 200 is already handling production workloads, including Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft said the chip also runs OpenAI models, its own MAI models and leading open-source models.

“We will scale our Azure Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, making Maia the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services,” Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Cloud + AI, said.

OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol announcement described an “Ultrafast” tier that was expected to arrive in the following days. The announcement did not identify the hardware supporting that tier.

Cerebras is building its business around wafer-scale computing systems and cloud infrastructure for artificial-intelligence inference. The company reported approximately $210 million in second-quarter 2026 core revenue and 600 megawatts of contracted data-center capacity.

Cerebras identified OpenAI as a significant customer and disclosed that its business depends on customer relationships, including a Master Relationship Agreement with OpenAI.

“This was an outstanding quarter for Cerebras. Core revenue more than doubled to $210 million, and our cloud business nearly quadrupled year-over-year,” co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman said.

A tranche of shares is scheduled to become eligible for sale at 6 a.m. ET (10:00 UTC) on Oct. 14. The company began trading on Nasdaq in May after pricing its IPO at $185 per share.