This week, artificial intelligence chip maker Cerebras Systems announced 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 earlier.
While the round was led by Tiger Global, a huge 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 Cerebra when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. From the Benchmark studyrately keeps its capital under $450 million, the company assembled two separate vehicles, both called “Benchmark Infrastructure,” according to regulatory filings. According to the person with knowledge of the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to finance Cerebras’ investment.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, the 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 that in perspective, the chip is made from almost an entire 300mm silicon wafer, the circular wafers that serve as the basis for all semiconductor manufacturing. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized pieces cut from these wafers. Cerebras uses almost the entire circle.
This architecture provides 900,000 specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company says the design allows AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.
The funding comes as Sunnyvale, Calif.-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, which runs 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 its proprietary chips designed to use artificial intelligence, are faster than Nvidia chips.
The company’s path to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, an artificial intelligence company based in the United Arab Emirates, which accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue by the first half of 2024. G42’s historic ties to Chinese tech companies prompted a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, overturning the initial withdrawal of Cerebras. 2025. Late last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras’ investor list, paving the way for a new IPO attempt.
Cerebras is now gearing up for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.
