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

This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems disclosed that it has secured $1 billion in new funding at a $23 billion valuation, nearly tripling its valuation from $8.1 billion just six months ago, positioning the Nvidia rival as one of the most valuable private AI hardware companies.

Although the round was led by Tiger Global, a substantial portion of the capital came from one of Cerebras' earliest supporters: Benchmark Capital. According to a source familiar with the transaction, Benchmark invested at least $225 million in the latest funding round.

Benchmark first backed Cerebras a decade ago, leading the company's $27 million Series A round in 2016. Because Benchmark intentionally caps its funds at under $450 million, the firm raised two separate investment vehicles — both named Benchmark Infrastructure — according to regulatory filings. The source said these vehicles were explicitly established to support the Cerebras investment.

Benchmark declined to comment on the matter.

Cerebras distinguishes itself through the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company's flagship Wafer Scale Engine, unveiled in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on each side and integrates 4 trillion transistors on a single piece of silicon. Unlike traditional chips, which are small segments cut from silicon wafers, Cerebras' chip is fabricated from nearly an entire 300-millimetre wafer, the circular foundation used in semiconductor manufacturing.

This design enables 900,000 specialised processing cores to operate simultaneously, allowing AI workloads to be handled without transferring data between chips—a common performance bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters. Cerebras says this architecture allows AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than rival systems.

The latest funding arrives as the Sunnyvale, California-based company gains traction in the race to supply next-generation AI infrastructure. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement valued at more than $10 billion to deliver 750 megawatts of computing capacity to OpenAI. The partnership, which runs through 2028, is designed to improve response times for complex AI workloads. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.

Cerebras claims its AI-optimised systems outperform Nvidia's offerings.

The company's journey toward an initial public offering has not been straightforward. Cerebras' relationship with G42 — an Abu Dhabi-based AI firm that accounted for 87% of its revenue in the first half of 2024 — triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States due to G42's past connections to Chinese technology companies. That review delayed Cerebras' IPO plans and led the company to withdraw a prior filing in early 2025.

By late last year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras' investor roster, clearing a major obstacle to a public listing. According to Reuters, Cerebras is now targeting an IPO in the second quarter of 2026.