This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced it had raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a $23 billion valuation — a nearly three-fold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation that rival Nvidia achieved just six months ago.
While Tiger Global led the round, much 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 Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. From Benchmark delibeThe company keeps its funding under $450 million, and has acquired two separate vehicles, both called “Benchmark Infrastructure,” according to regulatory filings. According to a person familiar with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to finance the Cerebras investment.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship to be introduced in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on each side and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To put that into perspective, the chip is made from almost an entire 300 millimeter silicon wafer, the circular disks that serve as the basis for all semiconductor manufacturing. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers; Cerebras uses almost a full circle instead.
This architecture provides 900,000 dedicated cores working in parallel, allowing the system to handle AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple individual chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company claims this 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 race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year contract worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which runs until 2028, aims to help OpenAI provide faster responses to complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Cerebras claims its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed to use AI, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.
The company’s path to IPO was complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based artificial intelligence firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties to Chinese tech companies prompted a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reflected Cerebras’ initial2 earlier plans to withdraw205 and even the withdrawal2 of earlier IPO plans5. Late last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras’ list of investors, clearing the way for a new IPO attempt.
Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.