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.”
The company has opened five new data centers in 2025 to house its AI hardware in locations including Dallas, Texas; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Santa Clara, California; among other locales, with more in the works in areas including Montreal and Europe.
Expanding its data center footprint and U.S. manufacturing hubs are largely where this recent round of funding will be put, in addition to some tech advances Feldman didn’t delve into.
Raising this latest funding wasn’t likely Cerebras’ initial plan as the company initially filed paperwork for an IPO exactly a year ago, September 30, 2024. It ran into regulatory delays soon after.
The company’s IPO was initially delayed because of a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States due to a $335 million investment from G42, an Abu Dhabi-based cloud and AI company. The IPO was further delayed in early 2025 due to unfilled positions in CFIUS at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s term.
Feldman said that the company still plans to IPO, but wouldn’t share specifics. He said that the company is following a common path for late-stage startups of raising a large funding round from largely public investors before listing on the public market itself.
“We chose a small number of leaders who would help us, not just in this round, but in the future,” Feldman said. “Companies that are leaders in late-stage private [fundraising], but predominantly do public. And you know, it’s our aspiration to be a public company.”
