Benchmark Capital has quietly assembled more than $225 million in dedicated capital to deepen its bet on Cerebras Systems, the AI chipmaker whose valuation has surged on the back of demand for specialized infrastructure to power large-scale artificial intelligence.
The money was raised through two bespoke vehicles named Benchmark Infrastructure, according to regulatory filings and a person familiar with the deal. Benchmark created these funds specifically to participate in Cerebras’ latest $1 billion financing, which valued the company at $23 billion, nearly triple its valuation just months earlier. Tiger Global led the round, but Benchmark emerged as one of the largest contributors.
The move underscores how far Benchmark is willing to stretch its traditional playbook. The firm is known for keeping its core funds under $450 million and for avoiding growth-stage, capital-intensive bets. Yet Cerebras, which Benchmark first backed in 2016 by leading its $27 million Series A, has become an outlier worth bending the rules for.
Cerebras’ appeal lies in its radical approach to AI hardware. Instead of stitching together many small chips, the company builds a single, enormous processor from almost an entire 300-millimeter silicon wafer. Its latest Wafer Scale Engine spans roughly 8.5 inches per side and integrates about 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 compute cores on one slab of silicon. By keeping all computation on a single chip, Cerebras aims to eliminate the data-transfer bottlenecks that plague conventional GPU clusters and claims more than 20-fold speedups on demanding AI inference workloads.
The company has parlayed that technology into marquee commercial traction. It recently signed a multi-year agreement valued at over $10 billion to deliver 750 megawatts of compute capacity to OpenAI, a deal intended to accelerate complex AI queries on OpenAI’s platforms. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras, further tightening the strategic ties between the two companies.
Cerebras’ path to the public markets has been less straightforward. Its heavy reliance on UAE-based G42, which once represented the vast majority of its revenue, drew scrutiny from U.S. national security regulators because of G42’s historical links to Chinese technology firms. That review delayed Cerebras’ initial IPO ambitions and forced the company to pull an earlier filing. After G42 was removed from its investor roster, Cerebras resumed preparations for a listing, now targeting a public debut in the second quarter of 2026.
