Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud
Startup Groq has raised $350 million as it continues to pivot from an AI chipmaker to a neocloud company that provides powerful GPUs and AI infrastructure services.
The new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia, values the company at $3.5 billion. That’s down from the $6.9 billion Groq was valued at last September, just a few months before Nvidia hired the startup’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, and other top talent as part of a licensing deal.
A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that despite the difference in valuation, the company doesn’t see it as a down round, but rather as establishing a new valuation for the “post-Nvidia-lincensing-deal version of Groq.”
Groq was focused on building its own chips, dubbed LPUs (language processing units), to compete with Nvidia on inference — the type of compute needed to run AI workloads in real time. After...
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