US-based artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems, in which Abu Dhabi’s G42 holds a stake, has successfully raised $1 billion in a new funding round. The financing underscores the intense investor interest in technologies capable of training and operating advanced AI models, and significantly boosts the company’s efforts to challenge Nvidia’s market dominance.
The latest round elevates Cerebras’s valuation to approximately $23 billion, nearly tripling its market capitalisation from its previous financing just four months ago.
A Surge in Investor Confidence
The late-stage funding was led by prominent US investment firm Tiger Global. The round also saw participation from a strong syndicate of investors including Benchmark, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Atreides Management, Alpha Wave Global, Altimeter, AMD, Coatue, and 1789 Capital.
This raise marks the company’s second billion-dollar round since September, when it announced a $1.1 billion Series G that valued it at $8.1 billion. Following that round, Cerebras withdrew its filing for a US initial public offering.
The G42 Connection and MENA Relevance
The partnership with Abu Dhabi’s G42, which owns about 1% of Cerebras, is a cornerstone of the chipmaker’s growth story. G42 has approximately $1.4 billion in long-term purchase commitments, and its partnership accounted for 87% of Cerebras’s revenue in the first half of 2024.
While this concentration raised investor questions during its previous IPO process, it highlights the deep strategic alignment between the two entities. Andrew Jackson, CEO of G42 subsidiary Inception, previously stated that the company was “doubling down on Cerebras.” As it works to diversify its customer base, which now includes clients like Saudi Aramco, the G42 relationship remains a critical driver of its commercial scale.
Navigating US Export Controls in the Gulf
The funding arrives amid a complex geopolitical landscape for AI hardware. Washington has tightened export controls on advanced AI processors to the region over concerns about sensitive technology access.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman noted that his company’s chips face the same US export rules as Nvidia’s. Recently, the US has begun granting tightly conditioned approvals for chip exports to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Feldman confirmed some shipments have been cleared under strict conditions, such as requiring management by US hyperscalers, illustrating how US policy is shaping the deployment of powerful AI infrastructure in the MENA region.
About Cerebras Systems
Cerebras Systems is a California-based company developing a new class of computer systems designed to accelerate artificial intelligence. The company’s flagship product is its “wafer-scale” processor, a single chip built on an entire silicon wafer. This unique design aims to dramatically speed up AI training and inference by keeping more data on a single, powerful processor, offering an alternative to Nvidia’s dominant graphics processing unit (GPU) approach.
Source: AGBI
