Benchmark raises $225M in special funds to double down on Cerebras

This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced it has raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $23 billion – a nearly threefold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had achieved just six months earlier.

While the round was led by Tiger Global, much of the new capital came from one of the company’s early backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley company 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. Since Benchmark deliberatesWhile keeping its funds below $450 million, the company has created two separate vehicles, both called “Benchmark Infrastructure,” according to regulatory filings. According to the 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 chip announced in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on each side and contains 4 trillion transistors in a single piece of silicon. To put that into perspective, the chip is made from almost an entire 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the round disks that serve as the basis for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers; Cerebras uses almost the entire circle instead.

This architecture delivers 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 it to perform AI inference tasks more than 20 times faster than competing systems.

The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, 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 extends until 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times for complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)

Cerebras claims its systems, built with proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.

The company’s path to the stock market was complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI company that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024. G42’s historic ties to Chinese tech companies led to a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reversed Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even prompted the company to withdraw an earlier filing in early 2025. By the end of last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras’ investor list, paving the way for another IPO attempt.

Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.