Shares of AI infrastructure companies faced notable pressure this week as separate developments rattled investor sentiment. Cerebras Systems (CBRS) fell more than 3% on Tuesday after Freedom Capital initiated coverage with a Hold rating, while CoreWeave (CRWV) suffered steep losses on Wednesday following news that Meta Platforms is building an internal cloud business called “Meta Compute.”
Cerebras, which went public on May 14 at $185 per share, saw its first quarterly report as a public company on June 23 deliver strong top-line growth. Revenue surged 92% year-over-year to $193.4 million, with hardware revenue up 60% and cloud revenue jumping 167%. However, gross margin guidance spooked investors. Despite Q1 margins expanding to 46.5%, the company forecast full-year margins of just 38%–41%. Management attributed the dip to a temporary decision to rent back systems from a customer while building out its own data center capacity. Freedom Capital’s Paul Meeks set a $209 price target and said the post-earnings sell-off reduced risk, but cautioned there is no guarantee the recent low near $161 will hold. Wall Street’s average target of $299.30 still implies 44% upside from current levels around $214. Cerebras holds a $20 billion multi-year deal with OpenAI and a partnership with Amazon Web Services that is expected to contribute meaningfully from 2027 onward.
CoreWeave’s sell-off was triggered by Meta’s move into cloud infrastructure, but analysts argue the panic is overblown. Renting spare GPU capacity is fundamentally different from CoreWeave’s dedicated, SLA-backed neocloud service. Crucially, Meta remains locked into a $21 billion deal with CoreWeave through 2032 under ironclad take-or-pay terms, preserving near-term revenue visibility. Enterprise clients may also hesitate to host sensitive AI workloads on an ad-tech giant’s infrastructure, giving pure-play providers like CoreWeave an edge. Wall Street maintains a consensus Overweight rating on CRWV, suggesting the pullback could be a buying opportunity.
