Startup Groq has raised $350 million in new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia. This funding values the company at $3.5 billion.
This new valuation follows Groq's pivot from an AI chipmaker to a neocloud company that provides powerful GPUs and AI infrastructure services. The company previously focused on building its own language processing units (LPUs) to compete with Nvidia on inference workloads.
Groq now operates 13 data centres across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, serving over 6 million developers, enterprises, and AI-native companies. The fresh funds are intended to support those seeking to use medium and larger clusters of Nvidia accelerated computing for training and inference.
Groq's chairman and CEO of Disruptive, Alex Davis, stated that the company is building Groq into the world's leading AI inference cloud, believing inference will become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure.