AI chip startup Cerebras has secured $1 billion in new funding to develop wafer-scale AI chips, SiliconANGLE reported on Feb. 4 (local time).

Tiger Global led the round, with existing investors including AMD, Fidelity Management and Alpha Wave Global participating. The funding lifted Cerebras' valuation to $23 billion.

Cerebras recently drew attention after signing a $10 billion AI hardware supply contract with OpenAI. Its flagship WSE-3 chip packs 4 trillion transistors, giving it 19 times more processing power than Nvidia's Blackwell B200 graphics card. It also has 44GB of SRAM memory built in to minimise data transfer delays, which the company said can improve the efficiency of AI model processing.

Wafer-scale chips are difficult to manufacture, an area the existing semiconductor industry has not attempted. Cerebras has said it solved manufacturing problems by dividing the WSE-3 into 900,000 cores and routing data around defects when they occur.

Cerebras applied for an IPO last year but withdrew the filing because it did not reflect the pace of its business growth. It plans to refile, aiming for an IPO as early as the second quarter of this year.