Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman wants you to know his company has a very good problem. The AI chipmaker is sitting on a $25 billion backlog of orders from some of the biggest names in tech, and it simply cannot build chips fast enough to fill them all.
That backlog, formally known as remaining performance obligations, represents committed revenue that Cerebras has yet to deliver. For a company that just reported Q1 2026 revenue of $193.4 million, a $25 billion pipeline is the kind of number that makes Wall Street do a double take.
The OpenAI anchor and a record-setting IPO
The single largest contributor to that backlog is a multi-year agreement with OpenAI worth more than $20 billion. The deal covers 750 megawatts of inference compute capacity, which in plain English means Cerebras will be powering a massive chunk of the infrastructure OpenAI uses to actually run its AI models after they’ve been trained.
Cerebras went public in May 2026 in what became the largest semiconductor IPO in history. Valuations have swung considerably, ranging from an initial estimate around $23 billion to peaks near $70 billion after trading began. Despite the eye-popping backlog and revenue growth of roughly 92% year-over-year, the market punished Cerebras shares after the company issued cautious guidance on margins.
