This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Techniques introduced that it raised $1 billion in contemporary capital at a valuation of $23 billion — a virtually threefold enhance from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached simply six months earlier.
Whereas the spherical was led by Tiger World, an enormous a part of the brand new capital got here from one of many firm’s earliest backers: Benchmark Capital. The distinguished Silicon Valley agency invested no less than $225 million in Cerebras’ newest spherical, based on an individual conversant in the deal.
Benchmark first guess on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Sequence A in 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately retains its funds below $450 million, the agency raised two separate autos, each referred to as ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ based on regulatory filings. In response to the particular person conversant in the deal, these autos have been created particularly to fund the Cerebras funding.
Benchmark declined to remark.
What units Cerebras aside is the sheer bodily scale of its processors. The corporate’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip introduced in 2024, measures roughly 8.5 inches on both sides and packs 4 trillion transistors right into a single piece of silicon. To place that in perspective, the chip is manufactured from almost a complete 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the round discs that function the muse for all semiconductor manufacturing. Conventional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments minimize from these wafers; Cerebras as an alternative makes use of virtually the entire circle.
This structure delivers 900,000 specialised cores working in parallel, permitting the system to course of AI calculations with out shuffling information between a number of separate chips (a significant bottleneck in standard GPU clusters). The corporate says the design permits AI inference duties to run greater than 20 occasions sooner than competing methods.
The funding comes as Cerebras, based mostly in Sunnyvale, Calif., positive factors momentum within the AI infrastructure race. Final month, Cerebras signed a multi-year settlement price greater than $10 billion to offer 750 megawatts of computing energy to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends via 2028, goals to assist OpenAI ship sooner response occasions for complicated AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman can be an investor in Cerebras.)
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Cerebras claims its methods, constructed with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are sooner than Nvidia’s chips.
The corporate’s path to going public has been sophisticated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI agency that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ income as of the primary half of 2024. G42’s historic ties to Chinese language expertise firms triggered a nationwide safety evaluation by the Committee on International Funding in the US, bumping again Cerebras’ preliminary IPO plans and even prompting the outfit to withdraw an earlier submitting in early 2025. By late final yr, G42 had been faraway from Cerebras’ investor record, clearing the way in which for a contemporary IPO try.
Cerebras is now making ready for a public debut within the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.
