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

This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Programs presented that it raised $1 billion in recent capital at a valuation of $23 billion — a on the self-discipline of threefold develop from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached correct six months earlier.

Whereas the spherical used to be led by Tiger World, an huge piece of the brand new capital got here from one among the firm’s earliest backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley firm invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ newest spherical, consistent with an person conscious of the deal.

Benchmark first wager on 10-year-pale Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately keeps its funds beneath $450 million, the firm raised two separate vehicles, each and each called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ consistent with regulatory filings. Based on the person conscious of the deal, these vehicles had been created namely to fund the Cerebras investment.

Benchmark declined to comment.

What items Cerebras aside is the sheer bodily scale of its processors. The firm’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip presented in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on every facet and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single half of silicon. To position that in perspective, the chip is manufactured from on the self-discipline of an complete 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that lend a hand because the foundation for all semiconductor production. Worn chips are thumbnail-sized fragments lower from these wafers; Cerebras as an quite quite a lot of makes exercise of nearly the overall circle.

This architecture delivers 900,000 specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the gadget to task AI calculations without shuffling knowledge between more than one separate chips (a fundamental bottleneck in pale GPU clusters). The firm says the invent permits AI inference tasks to flee greater than 20 times sooner than competing systems.

The funding comes as Cerebras, based mostly mostly in Sunnyvale, Calif., gains momentum within the AI infrastructure flee. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year settlement price more than $10 billion to offer 750 megawatts of computing energy to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends thru 2028, aims to attend OpenAI lift sooner response times for complicated AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is moreover an investor in Cerebras.)

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

The firm’s course to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based mostly mostly AI firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of the well-known half of of 2024. G42’s historic ties to Chinese expertise firms triggered a nationwide security overview by the Committee on Distant places Investment within the United States, bumping attend Cerebras’ preliminary IPO plans and even prompting the outfit to withdraw an earlier filing in early 2025. By leisurely last year, G42 had been eradicated from Cerebras’ investor list, clearing the skill for a recent IPO try.

Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut within the second quarter of 2026, consistent with Reuters.

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