Cerebras, the company powering the only wafer-scale AI compute, recently signed a multi-year, multi-billion dollar agreement with OpenAI. This enormous deal, worth more than $10 billion, will provide a staggering 750 megawatts of computing power. This partnership, which goes through 2028, is intended to strengthen the capacity in which AI development takes place, allowing for more complex applications and research to develop. The announcement coincides with Cerebras securing an impressive $1 billion in fresh capital, bringing its total valuation to $23 billion, nearly tripling from just $8.1 billion six months prior.
Cerebras was founded in 2016 and it shot out of the gate with a lot of hype. They’ve focused on making their own proprietary chips specifically for artificial intelligence workloads. The company has created a new architecture, with 900,000 highly specialized cores. These cores operate in parallel, powering these systems to run AI inference workloads over 20 times faster than competing systems. If true, this performance would outstrip that of Nvidia’s chips in performance, solidifying Cerebras’ position as one of the strongest challengers to Nvidia’s AI hardware dominance.
Tiger Global was the leading investor in the most recent funding round. Another $30 million of the investment was from Benchmark Capital, which had backed Cerebras through its $27 million Series A financing round. Benchmark has officially opened two distinct funds under the name ‘Benchmark Infrastructure.’ This latest move illustrates their extreme confidence in Cerebras’s trajectory and market potential.
Cerebras has seen substantial revenue growth, with G42, a UAE-based AI firm, accounting for 87% of its revenue as of the first half of 2024. Concerns over the growing bilateral relationship have galvanized a national security outcry. Consequently, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has initiated a review. For these reasons, G42 is no longer on Cerebras’ list of investors. This move signals a step toward a likely first-time public offering (IPO).
Cerebras produces these chips from the full almost 300-millimeter silicon wafer. The way they designed it greatly magnifies their computational power. The company’s focus on producing high-speed processing power positions it favorably in a competitive landscape where demand for AI technology continues to surge.
Cerebras’ unique architecture and capabilities have established it at the pinnacle of the rapidly accelerating field of artificial intelligence. With their recent deal with OpenAI, that latest agreement represents a new lucrative high-water mark. It points to the growing partnership between academia, government, and private-sector AI research.
