AAOI just showed what the market does to AI hardware with a catch. Cerebras reports Wednesday.

So AAOI printed $270M last night, up 127% from a year ago. datacenter alone was $156M, up 254%. beat on EPS too ($0.17 vs $0.14) and they're actually GAAP profitable now and the stock still got wrecked. it was already down like 60% in a month and dropped another 18% yesterday why? Q4 guide was $385-420M when the street wanted ~$427M. that's still +50% quarter over quarter lol. but margins slipped to 28.7% (were 31% a year ago), they've been selling stock to pay for factories (~$539M in Q2 alone), and the best part: their US expansion is delayed because they literally can't get enough electricity to the building nobody's doubting the demand anymore. the market is pricing power, capacity and dilution which brings me to Cerebras, reporting Wednesday the 12th they have $25.4B of backlog. their whole 2026 revenue guide is ~$885M. that's ~29 years of this year's revenue sitting in contracts but look at the Q3 guide: $214-216M core revenue vs $210M in Q2. basically flat. meanwhile mgmt says 2027 revenue more than triples. customers are OpenAI, G42, MBZUAI and AWS, so it's a short list Q2 GAAP loss was $450M (most of it stock comp) and the stock dumped ~14% after hours last time the only thing I care about Wednesday is whether they still say triple in 2027, and whether anything slips on the 600+ MW of data center capacity they need by end of 2027. if timing slides even a little, you just saw what happened to AAOI the AI trade is turning into a power and factories trade. Marvell just paid $115B for Lumentum to lock up lasers. whoever has the capacity and the electricity gets paid not advice, numbers are from their earnings releases