Nvidia rival Cerebras Systems raised a new round of private financing despite its previous plan to be trading on the public market by 2025.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras announced it raised a $1.1 billion Series G round on Tuesday that valued the AI hardware company at $8.1 billion. The round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital, among others.
Cerebras, which was founded in 2015 and offers chips, hardware systems, and cloud services specifically designed for AI, has now raised almost $2 billion in its 10-year history. Its most recent prior financing was a $250 million Series F round in 2021 that was led by Alpha Wave Ventures and valued the company at more than $4 billion.
This latest funding round follows a year of explosive growth, Andrew Feldman, Cerebras co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. Feldman said this growth is tied to the company’s AI inference services, the process of using AI models to generate outputs, which were released in August 2024.
“By [the second quarter] of 2024, we came to believe that [we] had crossed a tipping point in which the AI that had been made was becoming useful, and that means you would see an explosion of demand for inference,” Feldman said. “We reallocated some resources, we hired more people, and in August, we launched our inference cloud, and the demand has been overwhelming.”
