Benchmark raises $225M in private equity to continue on Cerebras

This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it has raised $1 billion in new equity capital $23 billion – an increase of almost three times from $8.1 billion calculating Nvidia’s value reached six months ago.

While the round was led by Tiger Global, a significant portion of the new capital came from one of the company’s previous backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley company invested at least $225 million in the latest Cerebras game, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Benchmark first bet on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led its initial $27 million Series A in 2016. Starting Benchmark does not existkeeps its capital under $450 million, the company raised two different vehicles, both called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to the records. According to a person familiar with the deal, the cars were designed specifically to help fund Cerebras.

Benchmark declined to comment.

What sets Cerebras apart is its number of processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship device announced in 2024, measures about 8.5 inches on each side and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To achieve this, the chip is made from a 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular disc that serves as the basis for all semiconductor devices. Classic chips are small chunks cut from these roasts; Cerebras instead uses almost the entire circle.

This architecture provides 900,000 unique cores that work together, allowing the machine to perform AI calculations without having to shuffle data between multiple chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU architectures). The company says its design enables AI tasks to run 20 times faster than competing systems.

The investment comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., steps up in the AI ​​race. Last month, Cerebras signed an important multi-year contract more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The agreement, which runs through 2028, aims to help OpenAI provide faster response times to complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is an entrepreneur at Cerebras.)

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

The company’s path to going public has been hampered by its relationship with G42, an AI company based in the UAE that will take 87% of Cerebras’ capital from the first half of 2024. G42’s historic ties to Chinese tech companies led to a national security review by the United States’ Committee on Foreign Investment, a reversal of Cerebras’ original plans and Cerebras’ early exit. 2025. By the end of last year, G42 had been delisted from Cerebras, paving the way for a new IPO attempt.

Cerebras is now planning its public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.