Cerebras closes $1 billion funding round at $23 billion valuation after landing OpenAI deal

AI chip startup Cerebras Systems has closed a financing round of over one billion dollars. The funding values the company at around 23 billion dollars, according to a press release. Tiger Global led the round, with Benchmark, Fidelity, AMD, Coatue, and other investors participating.

Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, builds specialized AI chips for fast inference - the speed at which AI models generate responses. The company's approach uses an entire wafer as a single chip, called the "Wafer Scale Engine" (WSE). Its current flagship is the WSE-3.

The recently announced deal with OpenAI, worth over ten billion dollars, likely helped attract investors. The AI lab plans to acquire 750 megawatts of computing capacity for ChatGPT over three years to speed up response times for its reasoning and code models. OpenAI is reportedly unhappy with Nvidia's inference speeds. Sam Altman recently promised "dramatically faster" responses when discussing the Codex code model—a promise likely tied to the Cerebras deal.