A year after filing to IPO, still-private Cerebras Systems raises $1.1B (techcrunch.com)

Cerebras Systems announced a $1.1 billion Series G round that values the AI-chip maker at $8.1 billion, bringing its total capital raised to nearly $2 billion. The financing was co‑led by Fidelity and Atreides Management with participation from Tiger Global, Valor and others. Founded in 2015, Cerebras builds chips, systems and a cloud specifically for AI; the company says explosive demand for inference — the runtime process of using models to generate outputs — has driven growth since it launched an inference cloud in August 2024. CEO Andrew Feldman said the company has already opened five new data centers in 2025 (including Dallas, Oklahoma City and Santa Clara) and plans more in Montreal and Europe. For the AI/ML community this round signals continued investor appetite for specialized AI hardware and inference capacity as model deployment scales beyond research. The funds will mainly expand Cerebras’s data center footprint and U.S. manufacturing hubs, increasing on‑premises throughput and regional capacity for latency‑sensitive inference workloads. The raise also comes amid a delayed IPO process — stalled by a CFIUS review related to a G42 investment — and Cerebras says it still intends to go public eventually. The deal highlights how late‑stage private rounds are being used as a bridge to IPO while companies scale infrastructure for production‑grade AI services.