Groq raises $650M six months after Nvidia licensing deal and executive departures

Groq, an AI chipmaker, confirmed a $650 million funding round, its first since September 2025 when it was last valued at $6.9 billion. The raise follows a December licensing agreement with Nvidia that granted non-exclusive access to Groq’s language processing unit (LPU) technology and involved the hiring of founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees.

In response, Groq is pivoting to its neocloud inference business, which it describes as a cloud service or on-premises hardware cluster. This business, previously led by Madra after Groq acquired his AI data analytics company Definitive Intelligence in 2024, now operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC. The company says it serves over five million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of tokens each week.

Groq has also hired replacement executives, including Alan Rice as COO, Sinclair Schuller as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO. Rice previously worked at xAI and Meta, while Schuller and Malhotra previously co-founded Nuvalence, a software-engineering firm acquired by EY in 2024. Malhotra also spent about a decade working on Microsoft’s cloud products.

The company did not disclose its new valuation. Groq created its LPU chip for inference workloads, but with Nvidia now licensing the LPU IP, Nvidia announced its own hardware cluster, the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference hardware system, at its GTC event in March.