Groq has raised $650 million to expand its global AI inference cloud, six months after licensing its chip technology to Nvidia and losing several senior employees to the semiconductor company.
Disruptive and Infinitum led the financing, with participation from existing investors that chose to reinvest. Groq did not disclose its latest valuation after being valued at $6.9 billion in a $750 million round announced in September 2025.
Groq Shifts Its Focus to Cloud Infrastructure
The company will use the funding to add computing capacity across its existing data centres and scale toward 200 megawatts by the end of 2027. It currently operates 13 facilities across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
Groq says its cloud platform serves more than five million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of tokens each week. Its systems are designed for inference, the process through which trained AI models generate responses and complete tasks.
The company previously sold systems based on its Language Processing Unit, or LPU, through its cloud service and private hardware clusters. Its current strategy places greater emphasis on operating inference infrastructure for customers rather than competing solely as an independent chip designer.
Nvidia Licensed Groq Technology and Hired Senior Staff
In December 2025, Groq entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia. Founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees joined Nvidia as part of the arrangement.
Groq remained an independent company, while GroqCloud continued operating. Nvidia later introduced the Groq 3 LPX, an inference system that incorporates the licensed LPU technology into its Vera Rubin platform.
Groq said the new investment will also help deploy LPX systems within its cloud infrastructure. This means the company will operate hardware derived from technology it originally developed but now shares with Nvidia through the licensing agreement.
New Executives Join Groq’s Leadership Team
Groq is led by CEO Adam Winter and CFO Matt Eng. It recently hired Alan Rice, formerly of xAI and Meta’s data-centre operations, as chief operating officer.
Sinclair Schuller will join as chief technology officer in July, while Rakesh Malhotra will become chief product officer. The pair previously co-founded software engineering company Nuvalence, which EY acquired in 2024.
Groq is betting that its experience operating purpose-built inference hardware can help it compete as demand grows for faster and less expensive AI processing. It faces competition from Nvidia, cloud providers, specialist inference companies, and startups developing alternative accelerators.
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