A year after filing to IPO, still-private Cerebras Systems raises $1.1B

Cerebras Systems, a key competitor to Nvidia, has successfully raised $1.1 billion in a Series G funding round, despite previously aiming to go public by 2025. The Silicon Valley-based company announced this significant investment on Tuesday, which has now elevated its valuation to $8.1 billion. The funding round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management, with contributions from notable investors such as Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital. Founded in 2015, Cerebras specializes in AI hardware, including chips and cloud services tailored for artificial intelligence applications. To date, the company has amassed nearly $2 billion in funding over its ten-year existence. The latest round follows a $250 million Series F round in 2021, which valued the company at over $4 billion and was led by Alpha Wave Ventures. Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras, attributed the recent surge in funding to the company’s rapid growth in AI inference services, which began in August 2024. "By the second quarter of 2024, we recognized that the AI we developed was becoming genuinely useful, leading to an explosion in demand for inference services," Feldman explained. This demand prompted the company to hire additional staff and launch its inference cloud, which has seen overwhelming interest. In response to this growth, Cerebras has opened five new data centers in 2025 across various locations, including Dallas and Santa Clara, with plans for more sites in Montreal and Europe. The funding will primarily support the expansion of its data center operations and U.S. manufacturing capabilities, alongside other technological advancements that Feldman chose not to disclose. Interestingly, this round of funding was not part of Cerebras’ original strategy, as the company had filed for an IPO exactly one year ago, on September 30, 2024. However, regulatory hurdles, including a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States concerning an investment from G42, an Abu Dhabi-based AI firm, have delayed the IPO process. Feldman remains optimistic about the company’s future public offering, though he refrained from providing specific timelines. He indicated that the approach of raising substantial funding before going public is a typical strategy for late-stage startups. "We selected a few strategic leaders who will assist us not only in this round but also in future endeavors," said Feldman. "Our goal is to transition to a public company when the time is right."