Cerebras Systems, a rival to Nvidia, has raised a new round of private financing despite its previous plan to trade on the public market by 2025. The Silicon Valley-based company announced it raised a 1.1 billion dollar Series G round on Tuesday, valuing the AI hardware company at 8.1 billion dollars. This round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management, with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital, among other investors.
Founded in 2015, Cerebras offers chips, hardware systems, and cloud services specifically designed for artificial intelligence. The company has now raised almost 2 billion dollars in its ten-year history. Its most recent prior financing was a 250 million dollar Series F round in 2021, which was led by Alpha Wave Ventures and valued the company at more than 4 billion dollars.
According to co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman, this latest funding follows a year of explosive growth. Feldman stated this growth is tied to the company’s AI inference services, which were released in August 2024. Inference is the process of using AI models to generate outputs. Feldman explained that by the second quarter of 2024, the company believed it had crossed a tipping point where AI was becoming genuinely useful, leading to an explosion of demand for inference. The company reallocated resources, hired more people, and launched its inference cloud, which has seen overwhelming demand.
To support this growth, the company has opened five new data centers in 2025 to house its AI hardware. These are located in places including Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Santa Clara, California, with more in development in areas like Montreal and Europe. Expanding its data center footprint and US manufacturing hubs are the primary areas where this new funding will be allocated, in addition to some technological advances that Feldman did not detail.
Raising this private funding was likely not Cerebras’s initial plan, as the company filed paperwork for an IPO exactly one year ago on September 30, 2024. It soon ran into regulatory delays. The IPO was initially delayed because of a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, related to a 335 million dollar investment from G42, an Abu Dhabi-based cloud and AI company. The IPO was further delayed in early 2025 due to unfilled positions within CFIUS at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s term.
Feldman said the company still plans to go public but would not share specifics. He noted that the company is following a common path for late-stage startups by raising a large funding round from largely public investors before listing on the public market itself. Feldman stated they chose a small number of leaders to help them not just in this round, but in the future, and that it remains their aspiration to become a public company.