Giant wafer AI accelerators: Cerebras is worth 8.1 billion US dollars

Californian chip designer Cerebras is scrapping its financing plans. Instead of going public in 2024, the company is now raising new money from investors. Old and new investors are contributing USD 1.1 billion in a very late Series G financing round. According to Cerebras itself, this increases its valuation to USD 8.1 billion – a doubling since 2021.

Cerebras builds so-called wafer scale engines (WSEs). Instead of exposing dozens to hundreds of individual chips on a silicon wafer and then cutting them out, Cerebras turns the majority of a wafer into a single huge chip with four trillion transistors. This means that, in addition to the arithmetic units, plenty of SRAM fits into the processor. Thanks to redundant transistors, WSEs work despite the usual exposure defects. The chip contract manufacturer TSMC produces the WSEs for Cerebras using 5-nanometer technology. The focus is now on the execution of AI algorithms (inference).

"Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners and 1789 Capital as well as existing investors Altimeter, Alpha Wave Global and Benchmark participated significantly in the round," writes Cerebras in an announcement. 1789 Capital is close to the current US government: Donald Trump Jr. is a partner there.

No IPO for the moment

Cerebras has put the IPO on the Nasdaq planned for September 2024 on hold for now. Cerebras did not give any reasons for this in its notification to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to the news agency Reuters, a national security review was hung up on an investment by G42: G42 is from the United Arab Emirates and has invested 335 million dollars in Cerebras. The Trump administration is said to have previously approved the investment.

In addition, G42 is by far the largest buyer of Cerebra's wafer scale engines. According to the application for the initial public offering (IPO), G42 accounted for around 83% of sales in 2023. In the first half of 2024, the share rose to 87 percent.

US hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and, more recently, OpenAI have so far preferred AI accelerators from Nvidia and AMD. They are also increasingly designing their own chips to complement them. However, Microsoft is also linked to Cerebras in a roundabout way – 2024 Microsoft invested USD 1.5 billion in G42.

In an interview with Reuters, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman emphasised that the company is still aiming for an IPO. There is no new date.

(mma)