This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it has raised $1 billion in new funding at a value of $23 billion — a three-fold increase from the $8.1 billion that rival Nvidia raised six months earlier.
While the round was led by Tiger Global, most of the new capital came from one of the company’s early backers: Benchmark Capital. The popular Silicon Valley firm invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ latest round, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.
Benchmark started betting on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led a series A of $27 million in 2016. Starting with Benchmark delibekeeping its capital under $450 million, the company raised two separate vehicles, both called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to official documents. According to a person with knowledge of the deal, these cars were built to finance the Cerebras investment.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the physical scale 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 that in perspective, a chip is produced almost entirely from a 300 millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that serve as the basis for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are icon-sized pieces cut from these wafers; Cerebras instead uses almost the entire circle.
This architecture delivers 900,000 specialized cores that work in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between many different chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company claims that the architecture makes AI tasks run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.
The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is gaining 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 through 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 says its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.
The company’s path to transparency has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue from the first quarter of 2024. The G42’s historic relationship with Chinese technology companies has resulted in a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, prompting the early withdrawal of Cerebras plans and canceling the IPO at the start of development plans. 2025. Late last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras’ investor list, paving the way for a new IPO attempt.
Cerebras is now preparing for a public launch in the second half of 2026, according to Reuters.
