Groq Raises $650 Million to Expand AI Cloud Services and Data Centers

Groq, a company specializing in artificial intelligence chips, announced it has raised $650 million in a new funding round approximately six months after reaching a broad agreement with Nvidia. This agreement granted Nvidia a non-exclusive license to Groq’s technologies and involved the transfer of several key executives from Groq to the chip giant. The new capital will be used to restructure Groq’s management team and broaden its cloud services designed for rapid AI model deployment.

The recent funding follows a December deal with Nvidia, in which Nvidia obtained a license to Groq’s technologies. Following this, Groq’s founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, and other employees moved to Nvidia. Groq has not disclosed its latest valuation, though it was valued at $6.9 billion after a $750 million funding round in September. Doug Whiteman has taken over as CEO while remaining with the company.

Groq has developed a chip it calls a language processing unit, intended for inference tasks, which it sells through a cloud service. After the Nvidia agreement, Groq shifted focus toward expanding this cloud activity. The company reported that its cloud now operates across 13 data centers located in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. This infrastructure supports more than 5 million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of code units weekly. Additionally, Groq has appointed new executives in operations, technology, and product management.