Artificial intelligence chip maker Cerebras Systems announced this week that it has raised $1 billion in new capital at a valuation 23 billion dollars — a nearly three-fold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation reached by rival Nvidia just six months ago.
While the round was led by Tiger Global, a significant portion of the new capital came from one of the company’s early backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley company 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. Since the normative discussionThe company is keeping its cash below $450 million and has raised two separate vehicles, both called “modular infrastructure,” according to regulatory filings. According to the person familiar with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to finance the Cerebras investment.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical size of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip announced in 2024, measures about 8.5 inches on each side and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To put this in perspective, the chip is made from a full silicon wafer approximately 300 mm in diameter, which are circular discs that serve as the basis for all semiconductor production processes. Traditional chips are small sized portions cut from these chips. Instead, Cerebras uses almost the entire circuit.
This architecture provides 900,000 specialized cores running in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in traditional GPU clusters). The company says the design enables AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.
The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, is gaining momentum in the AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which runs through 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times to complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)
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Cerebras claims that its systems, built with its own chips designed to use artificial intelligence, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.
The company’s path to going public was complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based artificial intelligence company that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties with Chinese technology companies led to a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which pushed back Cerebras’ IPO plans and even prompted the company to withdraw a previous filing in early 2025. By late last year. G42 has been removed from Cerebras’ investor list, paving the way for a new attempt to go public.
Cerebras is now preparing for its public debut in the second quarter of 2026. According to Reuters.
