Cerebras Systems, a U.S.-based AI chipmaker, has raised $1.1 billion in a pre-IPO funding round, boosting its valuation to $8.1 billion. The company, which filed for an initial public offering exactly a year ago, has opted to stay private for now while expanding its operations and taking on Nvidia in the growing AI chip market.

Founded in 2016 in Sunnyvale, California, by CEO Andrew Feldman and co-founders Jean-Philippe Fricker, Michael James, Gary Lauterbach, and Sean Lie, Cerebras designs chips specifically for training and running large-scale AI models. Its products include the wafer-scale AI processors WSE-1, WSE-2, and the latest WSE-3, boasting up to 90,000 AI cores, 44GB on-chip SRAM, and 21PB/s memory bandwidth. The WSE-3 delivers 125 FP16 PetaFLOPS while maintaining power efficiency, making it particularly suitable for training and inference of massive AI models.

Cerebras operates a cloud-based AI inference service and also supports on-premises deployments. Since launching its inference services in late 2024, the company has maintained daily performance leadership, often running AI models more than 20 times faster than Nvidia GPUs. In May 2025, its CS-3 system set a world record on Llama 4 Maverick (400B parameters), processing 2,500 tokens per second per user—2.5 times faster than Nvidia's DGX B200 system.

The new funding round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Atreides Management, with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, 1789 Capital, and existing investors Altimeter, Alpha Wave, and Benchmark. The proceeds will support expansion of U.S. manufacturing capacity, data center infrastructure, and continued innovation in AI processor, packaging, system design, and AI supercomputing technologies.

Cerebras has steadily expanded production capacity, with chip wafers manufactured by TSMC and packaged in the U.S. CEO Feldman said manufacturing capacity has grown eightfold over the past 18 months, with another fourfold increase planned in the coming months.

Despite rapid revenue growth—from $6 million in Q2 2023 to about $70 million in Q2 2024—Cerebras remains unprofitable. Its AI infrastructure services now cater to hundreds of leading enterprises, government agencies, and millions of developers globally, including AWS, Meta, IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Its largest client, UAE-based G42, accounted for 87% of revenue in H1 2024.

Feldman emphasized that the company remains committed to going public but is using the additional funding to capitalize on growth opportunities: "We have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and it's wise not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital."

Cerebras' combination of advanced wafer-scale AI chips, unmatched inference performance, and strategic investment positions the company as one of the most influential AI hardware players in the market today.