Cerebras Systems just closed a massive $1.1 billion Series G round at an $8.1 billion valuation, exactly one year after filing for an IPO that regulatory delays have kept off the table. The AI hardware company's pivot back to private funding highlights how foreign investment scrutiny is reshaping Silicon Valley's path to public markets, even as demand for AI inference services explodes.
Cerebras Systems was supposed to be trading publicly by now. Instead, the AI chip company just closed one of the year's largest private funding rounds - a $1.1 billion Series G that values the Nvidia rival at $8.1 billion. The timing isn't coincidental. It's been exactly one year since Cerebras filed its IPO paperwork, and regulatory delays have turned what should have been a public debut into an extended private funding marathon.
The round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management, with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital. For a company that's raised almost $2 billion since its 2015 founding, this latest infusion represents a significant bet on AI infrastructure at a time when inference demand is reshaping the entire sector.
"By the second quarter of 2024, we came to believe that we had crossed a tipping point in which the AI that had been made was becoming useful, and that means you would see an explosion of demand for inference," CEO Andrew Feldman told TechCrunch. That tipping point translated into real business momentum when Cerebras launched its inference cloud services in August 2024.
The numbers back up Feldman's optimism. Cerebras has opened five new data centers this year alone, spanning Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Santa Clara, with expansions planned for Montreal and Europe. It's the kind of rapid infrastructure buildout that requires serious capital - exactly what this $1.1 billion round provides. The funding will primarily fuel data center expansion and U.S. manufacturing capabilities, though Feldman remained tight-lipped about specific technical advances in development.
But this funding round tells a bigger story about how foreign investment scrutiny is reshaping Silicon Valley's IPO landscape. Cerebras filed for its IPO on September 30, 2024, only to hit immediate regulatory roadblocks. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) flagged the company's $335 million investment from G42, an Abu Dhabi-based cloud and AI company, triggering a national security review that's still ongoing.
