This week, AI chip maker Cerebras Systems announced it raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $23 billion — an increase of almost three times compared to the $8.1 billion valuation that Nvidia’s rival had reached just six months earlier.
While the round was led by Tiger Global, a large portion of the new capital came from one of the company’s early backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley firm invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ latest round, according to a person familiar with the deal.
Benchmark first bet on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. From the deliberation on the reference pointmaintains its funding below $450 million, the company raised two separate vehicles, both called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to regulatory filings. According to the person familiar with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to finance Cerebras’ investment.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the enormous physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip announced in 2024, measures about 8.5 inches on each side and contains 4 trillion transistors on a single piece of silicon. To put this in perspective, the chip is made from almost a 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular disks that serve as the basis for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers; On the other hand, Cerebras uses almost the entire circle.
This architecture offers 900,000 specialized cores running in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data across multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company claims the design allows AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.
The funding comes as Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras gains momentum in the race for AI infrastructure. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more of $10 billion provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which will run until 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times for complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)
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Cerebras claims its systems, built with proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia chips.
The company’s path to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a United Arab Emirates-based artificial intelligence company that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties to Chinese technology companies triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, setting back Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even leading the company to withdraw a filing earlier in early 2025. By the end of last year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras’ investor list, clearing the way for a new IPO attempt.
Cerebras is now preparing for its public debut in the second quarter of 2026. according to Reuters.
