Cerebras has raised $1.1 billion in a new funding round from various investors. The AI chipmaker is postponing its IPO, which was already expected to occur last year. In the meantime, Cerebras is worth twice as much as it was back in 2021.
The newly raised funds will go towards expanding production in the United States. After production by TSMC, Cerebras’ chips are packaged in America. This second process is particularly complex in the case of this AI company due to the large size of the processors. Unlike chips from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, these are “wafer-scale” products, i.e., chips that are as large as the discs upon which the chip designs are drawn. Such a design is only possible due to leaving large wiggle room for imperfections, but it allows for enormous bandwidth and on-die memory, critical for AI performance.
“We have increased production capacity eight times in the past 18 months and will increase it four more times in the next six to eight months,” says CEO Andrew Feldman.
Cerebras’ revenue grew from less than $6 million in the second quarter of 2023 to approximately $70 million in the same period of 2024. This year, the company announced customers such as Hugging Face, Meta, Notion, and Perplexity.
Valuation doubled
The new funding round values Cerebras at $8.1 billion. This is more than double the $4 billion the company was worth in 2021. Feldman explains to CNBC that the company still plans to go public. “I don’t think this indicates a preference for one or the other. We have tremendous opportunities ahead of us, and it’s good not to let them slip away due to a lack of capital.”
Cerebras makes chips for AI training and inferencing and operates a cloud service that runs LLMs. The company competes directly with Nvidia, currently the unchallenged market leader. The actual IPO was announced exactly one year ago but was delayed due to complications surrounding G42, a major customer in the Middle East. The G42 episode led to a clash with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which must approve foreign investments before an IPO on Wall Street is allowed.
Despite the delay, investors remain optimistic about Cerebras. Participants in the financing round include 1789 Capital, Alpha Wave Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Atreides Management, Benchmark, Tiger Global, and Valor Equity Partners. Feldman calls these “investors that anyone would be proud to have as the cornerstone of an IPO.”
The IPO remains scheduled for later in 2025.