This week, AI chipmaker Cerebra Systems announced it had raised $1 billion in new funding at a valuation of $23 billion. That's nearly tripled from the $8.1 billion valuation that Nvidia's rival reached just six months ago.
The round was led by Tiger Global, but the bulk of the new funding 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 the 10-year-old Cerebras in 2016 when it led a $27 million Series A. Because Benchmark intentionally keeps its funding below $450 million, the company has raised two separate vehicles, both called “Benchmark Infrastructure,” according to regulatory filings. The vehicles were created specifically to finance the investment in Cerebras, according to people familiar with the deal.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the physical scale of its processors. The company's flagship chip, the 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 that in perspective, chips are manufactured almost entirely from 300-millimeter silicon wafers, the circular disks that are the basis of all semiconductor manufacturing. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized pieces cut from these wafers. Instead, the cerebrum uses almost the entire circle.
This architecture provides 900,000 specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the system to process AI computations without shuffling data across multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in traditional GPU clusters). The company says this design allows it to perform AI inference tasks 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 deal worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership extends until 2028 and aims to enable OpenAI to reduce response times for complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)
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Cerebras claims its system, built with its own chips designed for AI applications, is 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 accounted for 87% of Cerebras' revenue as of the first half of 2024. The G-42's historic relationship with Chinese technology companies prompted a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, set back Cerebras' original IPO plans, and even led to the organization withdrawing its previous filing in early 2025. By the end of last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras' investor list, paving the way for a new IPO.
According to Reuters, Cerebras is currently preparing for a public launch in the second quarter of 2026.