Groq secures $650M funding after Nvidia talent acquisition
Original: AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire deal
Why This Matters
Groq's recovery demonstrates competitive resilience in AI inference markets despite IP loss to Nvidia, with shifting focus to cloud infrastructure.
AI chipmaker Groq confirmed a $650 million funding round led by Disruptive and Infinitum in June 2026, six months after Nvidia signed a licensing agreement for its LPU technology and hired away founder Jonathan Ross and other key executives.
Groq announced its $650 million Series C funding round on Monday, led by Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive (founded by Alex Davis, who serves as Groq's chairman) and Fort Lauderdale hedge fund Infinitum. The funding comes approximately six months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq's language processing unit (LPU) technology in December 2025 and recruited founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees. The company did not disclose its new valuation; it was last valued at $6.9 billion following a $750 million round in September 2025. Jonathan Ross, formerly of Google where he helped create the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), co-founded Groq with fellow Google engineer Doug Wightman ten years ago. Wightman remained at Groq and became CEO following Ross's departure. Groq developed the LPU chip for inference operations, sold as cloud services or on-premises hardware clusters. After Nvidia acquired the LPU IP, it unveiled the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference hardware system at GTC in March 2026. In response, Groq pivoted to expand its neocloud business, which operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC, serving over five million developers and thousands of AI companies while processing trillions of tokens weekly. The company has also hired replacement executives: Alan Rice as COO (formerly at xAI and Meta), Sinclair Schuller as CTO (co-founder of Nuvalence), and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO (previously at Microsoft and Nuvalence).