AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650 million raise and hiring rehires after $20 billion non-acquisition of Nvidia

What does an AI company do after a non-acquisition deal, where a competitor pays investors huge intellectual property “licensing” fees while poaching its critical talent? For AI chip maker Groq, the solution appears to be to raise more money from investors — which reportedly made big profits after a deal with Nvidia in December — hire more talent, and pivot.

On Monday, Groq announced a new $650 million funding round, confirming previous reports. The raise comes roughly six months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s technology and hired founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees. Groq did not reveal its new rating. It was last valued at $6.9 billion after a $750 million round in September.

Ross, who came from Google, was well-known in the AI ​​chip world for helping create Google’s AI chip, the Tensor Processing Unit. He teamed up with another Google engineer, Doug Whitman, to launch Groq a decade ago. Whitman stayed on after the Nvidia deal and became CEO.

Groq created a chip it called a language processing unit (LPU), used for inference, and sold it as part of a cloud service or on-premises hardware cluster.

With Nvidia now owning the IP for LPUs, the GPU giant announced its own hardware lineup, the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference hardware system, at its GTC event in March.

In response, Groq has focused on its new cloud business. That business was run by Madra after Groq acquired his AI data analysis company Definitive Intelligence in 2024. The company has grown to 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region, serving more than five million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of tokens every week, the company says.

Groq has also appointed replacement executives. The company has added Alan Rice as COO, who previously worked at xAI and Meta, after serving in the US Navy.

It also added leadership duo Sinclair Schuller, who joins as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO. They previously worked together at Apprenda, an enterprise cloud software company founded by Schuler; They then co-founded Nuvalence, a software engineering firm that was acquired by EY in 2024. Malhotra previously spent about a decade working on Microsoft’s cloud products.

Groq’s success after almost selling itself depends on how competitive its inference cloud can remain, now that the main hardware IP is shared with Nvidia. Sure, she has a bullet. Inference-related technology is an area that is seeing huge demand (and venture capital investment). But it is also seeing an increase in innovation and competition.

However, others seem to have been spared this type of deal. Jason Drooge, CEO of Scale AI, told Forbes that business has picked up after Meta made a $14.3 billion unacquired hire about a year ago, and that the company is on track to hit $1 billion in revenue.

In the big money game of AI, anything seems possible.