Cerebras was valued at over $4 billion in the latest round.

Cerebras Systems, which is building a new class of computers to accelerate artificial intelligence work by orders of magnitude beyond what is currently possible, announced Wednesday its close of a $250 million Series F round led by Alpha Wave Ventures along with Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG). Other bulge bracket investors included Altimeter Capital, Benchmark Capital, Coatue Management, Eclipse Ventures, Moore Strategic Ventures, and VY Capital. (Cerebras)

Cerebras and CS-2’s AI

In what it calls AI compute, Cerebras’ CS-2 system, powered by the world’s largest processor – the WSE-2, enables customers to accelerate their deep learning many times over general purpose compute.

To appreciate the scale of its comparative perfomance, the company’s technology accelerates the time for today’s AI work from months to minutes, and from weeks to seconds – all at a fraction of the power and space.

CS-2 is used by customers in pharma and life sciences, defense, supercomputing centers, national labs, and other sectors.

Customers include Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for its groundbreaking Neocortex AI supercomputer, EPCC, the supercomputing center at the University of Edinburgh, Tokyo Electron Devices, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca.

Use of funds

The company will use the funding to deploy the CS-2 to new customers and expand its business globally.

“This new funding allows us to extend our global leadership to new regions, democratizing AI, and ushering in the next era of high-performance AI compute to help solve today’s most urgent societal challenges – across drug discovery, climate change, and much more,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of the company.

Related Story: Cerebras Systems Unveils WSE-2, A Monster AI Chip With 2.6T Transistors