Groq raises $350M at $3.5B valuation, Nvidia plans to join

Startup Groq announced on August 17 that it raised $350 million in Series A funding at a $3.5 billion valuation, led by Disruptive, with Nvidia planning to participate. Earlier, in June, Groq had raised $650 million, bringing recent total funding to $1 billion. Last December, Groq signed a $20 billion non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia for LPU inference ASIC technology, transitioning from an AI chip developer to an AI cloud service provider, also known as a "Neocloud." On August 12, Groq became an Nvidia cloud partner, offering training and inference services on Nvidia's accelerated computing clusters. Its compute capacity is expected to grow from 54MW to over 200MW by 2027.