Groq raises $650 million for AI inference cloud after Nvidia licensing deal

Groq raised $650 million to expand its inference cloud business six months after licensing its semiconductor technology to Nvidia and losing its founder.

The funding round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum. Groq’s press announcement said existing investors also participated.

The company did not disclose a new valuation. Groq was valued at $6.9 billion after its September $750 million fundraising round.

Groq pivots to cloud infrastructure after Nvidia deal

In December 2025, Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s language processing unit (LPU) technology, a chip designed specifically for running AI models.

As part of that arrangement, Nvidia hired away Groq co-founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other staff.

Nvidia went on to unveil its own hardware system built on the licensed technology, the LPX inference platform, at its GTC conference in March.

Groq has repositioned around its cloud infrastructure business. The company runs 13 data centers spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, serving over five million developers and processing trillions of AI tokens per week, per its press release.

The newest inference hardware from Groq, which includes Nvidia’s LPX systems, will be deployed across existing data centers with the assistance of the new capital. Groq stated that its objective is to achieve 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027.

Groq taps xAI and Meta veterans to fill key executive roles

Groq has been rebuilding its executive team since the Nvidia departures. The board is currently chaired by Alex Davis, the founder and CEO of Disruptive, the main investor. Adam Winter serves as CEO and Matt Eng as CFO, both long tenured at the company, according to Groq’s announcement.

Alan Rice joined as chief operating officer after stints at xAI and Meta’s data center division. Starting in July, Sinclair Schuller will take on the CTO role and Rakesh Malhotra will become chief product officer.

The pair previously co-founded Nuvalence, a software engineering firm that EY acquired in 2024. Malhotra also spent about a decade at Microsoft working on cloud and data center products.

Groq is wagering that running AI models in production will become a far larger market than training them. Inference, the process of generating outputs from trained models, requires an estimated 15 to 20 times more compute than training over time, according to the company.

“We believe inference will become the largest infrastructure market in technology,” John Yetimoglu, Groq board member and Infinitum’s founder, said in the company’s announcement. “As AI moves from experimentation to production, demand for reliable, cost-efficient inference will continue to grow exponentially.”