Groq Raises $350M at $3.5B, Half Prior Value After Nvidia Deal
TL;DR
- Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, roughly half what it was worth nearly a year ago.
- Dallas-based Disruptive led the round, with Nvidia itself also participating according to a Groq representative.
- The company is pivoting to inference-focused data centers, aiming to expand capacity beyond 200 megawatts next year.
Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. That is roughly half what the startup was worth nearly a year ago, before Nvidia struck a licensing deal with the company and hired away much of its talent, including founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross.
The round was led by Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive. Nvidia itself is also set to invest, according to a representative for Groq.
"Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure," said Alex Davis, Groq's executive chairman and founder of Disruptive.
Groq has been recasting itself as a data center operator focused on inference, the workload of running trained AI models rather than training them. It previously announced raising $650 million in June toward the same effort and plans to expand total capacity to more than 200 megawatts by next year. Nvidia's participation here echoes its recent pattern of taking stakes across the AI infrastructure stack, one of 184 Nvidia stories we've tracked in the last 90 days.
Originally reported by bloomberg.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Groq Raises $350M at $3.5B — Half Its Prior Value After Nvidia Licensed Its Tech and Hired the CEO