Groq has raised $650 million to expand its inference cloud business, six months after licensing its semiconductor technology to Nvidia and losing its founder.
This funding round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum. According to a Groq press release, existing investors also participated.
The company has not disclosed the new valuation. Groq was valued at $6.9 billion in a $750 million funding round in September.
Groq pivots to cloud infrastructure after signing deal with Nvidia
In December 2025, Nvidia entered into a non-exclusive license agreement for Groq’s Language Processing Unit (LPU) technology, a chip specifically designed to run AI models.
As part of that deal, Nvidia hired Groq’s co-founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other staff.
Nvidia announced its own hardware system built on its licensed technology, the LPX inference platform, at the GTC conference in March.
Groq has repositioned itself around its cloud infrastructure business. The company operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, serving more than 5 million developers and processing trillions of AI tokens every week, according to a press release.
Groq’s latest inference hardware, including Nvidia’s LPX systems, will be deployed across existing data centers with the support of new capital. Groq said its goal is to achieve 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027.
Groq hires xAI and Meta veterans for key executive roles
Groq has undergone a management restructuring since Nvidia’s departure. The board of directors is currently chaired by Alex Davis, founder and CEO of Disruptive, a major investor. According to Groq’s announcement, Adam Winter is CEO and Matt Eng is CFO, both of whom have been with the company for a long time.
Alan Rice joins as chief operating officer after previously working in xAI and Meta’s data center divisions. Starting in July, Sinclair Schuler will become chief technology officer (CTO) and Rakesh Malhotra will become chief product officer.
They previously co-founded Nuvalence, a software engineering company that EY acquired in 2024. Mr. Malhotra also spent about 10 years at Microsoft developing cloud and data center products.
Groq is betting that running AI models in production will be a much bigger market than training AI models. Inference, the process of generating output from a trained model, requires an estimated 15 to 20 times more computing than training over time, according to the company.
“We believe inference will become the largest infrastructure market in technology,” Groq board member and Infinitum founder John Yetimoglu said in the company’s announcement. “As AI moves from experimentation to production, the demand for reliable and cost-effective inference will continue to grow exponentially.”
