Benchmark Raises $225M in Special Funding to Double Cerebras

This week, AI chip maker Cerebras Systems announced it had raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a $23 billion valuation — a nearly threefold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation rival Nvidia had reached just six months earlier.

Although the round was led by Tiger Global, a huge chunk of the new capital came from one of the company’s earliest 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 in a $27 million Series A round in 2016. Since Benchmark delibekeeps its funds under $450 million, the firm raised 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 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 roughly 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 discs that serve as the basis for all semiconductor manufacturing. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized pieces cut from these wafers; Instead, Cerebras uses almost the entire circle.

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 says the design allows AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.

The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., gains momentum in the race for AI infrastructure. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement 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.)

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

The company’s path to the IPO was complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based artificial intelligence firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of 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, pushing back Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even prompting the company to withdraw earlier filing early 2025 Late last year, G42 was removed from Cerebras’ list of investors, clearing 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.