AI chipmaker Groq has confirmed a new $650 million funding round, just months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s chip technology and hired away its founder and key employees. The round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum.
While Groq did not disclose its new valuation, the company was last valued at $6.9 billion following a $750 million round in September 2025. The raise comes roughly six months after Nvidia agreed to license Groq’s language processing unit (LPU) technology and poached founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other staff in what the industry has dubbed a “not-acqui-hire” deal.
Ross, a former Google engineer who helped create Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, co-founded Groq a decade ago with Doug Wightman, who stayed on after the Nvidia deal and became CEO. Groq’s LPU chips were designed specifically for AI inference and were sold as part of a cloud service or on-premises hardware cluster.
In response to Nvidia now owning the LPU IP and launching its own Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference hardware, Groq has pivoted to its neocloud business. That neocloud operation has grown to 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC, serving over five million developers and thousands of AI companies processing trillions of tokens each week.
Groq has also been rebuilding its executive team, adding Alan Rice as COO from xAI and Meta, Sinclair Schuller as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO. Whether Groq can succeed after its near-acquisition depends on how competitive its inference cloud remains in a space seeing tremendous demand and increasing competition.
Source: TechCrunch
