Feb 4 (Reuters) – AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Wednesday it raised $1 billion in a late-stage funding round that valued it at $23 billion, nearly tripling its valuation just over four months after its previous financing.
The round was led by Tiger Global. Other investors included Benchmark, Coatue and Donald Trump Jr.-backed 1789 Capital.
AI-linked companies have continued to draw billions in private financing as corporations and governments race to develop data centers for supporting the still-nascent technology.
The race has made the chips required for computing power in these data centers a prized commodity, fueling rival Nvidia’s meteoric rise to the most valuable company in the world.
The fundraising marks Cerebras’ second billion-dollar round since September, when it was valued at $8.1 billion, reflecting the investor allure for a company that could grow to become a key player in the AI-chip supply chain alongside Nvidia and AMD, which also participated in the round.
It comes at a time when key AI players are looking to diversify their chip supplies.
Reuters reported on Monday that OpenAI was seeking alternatives to Nvidia for AI inference chips, including Cerebras, AMD, and Groq.
Amid OpenAI’s reservations, Nvidia approached companies working on SRAM-heavy chips, including Cerebras and Groq, about a potential acquisition. Cerebras declined and struck a commercial deal with OpenAI, which was announced last month.
The round is also Cerebras’ first since it withdrew its U.S. IPO filing in October, underscoring a broader trend of companies staying private for longer with abundant capital available outside of public markets.
Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras is known for its wafer-scale engine chips, designed to speed up the training and inference of large AI models and compete with products from Nvidia and other AI chipmakers.
(Reporting by Ateev Bhandari and Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Alan Barona)
