This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced it had raised $1 billion in new capital at a valuation of $23 billion. That’s nearly three times the $8.1 billion valuation that Nvidia’s rival achieved just six months earlier.
The round was led by Tiger Global, but much of the new capital came from Benchmark Capital, one of the company’s early backers. Prominent Silicon Valley firms invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ latest round, according to people familiar with the deal.
Benchmark first bet on 10-year-old Cerebras in 2016, when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A. After benchmark deliberationThe company raised two separate vehicles, dubbed ‘Benchmark Infrastructure’, while keeping its funding under $450 million, according to regulatory filings. The vehicle was built specifically to raise funds for Cerebras’ investment, according to a person familiar with the deal.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the physical scale of its processors. The flagship chip, Wafer Scale Engine, 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, chips are manufactured almost entirely from 300mm silicon wafers, the circular disks that are the basis of all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized pieces cut from these wafers. Instead, the cerebrum uses almost the full circle.
This architecture provides 900,000 specialized cores operating in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple individual chips (a major bottleneck in traditional GPU clusters). The company says this 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 AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year contract worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 MW of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends 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, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.
The company’s path to listing has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI company that accounts for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of the first half of 2024. The G42’s historical ties to Chinese technology companies prompted a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, thwarted Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even led it to withdraw its previous application in early 2025. By the end of last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras’ investor list, paving the way for a new IPO attempt.
According to Reuters, Cerebras is currently preparing for its public debut in the second quarter of 2026.
