Groq raises 350M USD for its Nvidia-backed inference cloud

Groq has announced a 350M USD Series A round led by Disruptive, with planned participation from Nvidia. The company says the round values Groq at 3.5B USD and, combined with a 650M USD raise in June, brings recent funding to 1B USD.

This is not just another AI funding item. Groq spent years pitching its own LPU chips as an inference alternative to Nvidia. After Nvidia struck a licensing deal with the company and hired founder Jonathan Ross and other senior talent, Groq has been reshaped into an AI infrastructure provider built around Nvidia accelerated computing.

The company says it now operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, serving more than six million developers, Fortune 500 enterprises and AI-native companies. The new capital is meant to support medium and larger clusters for training and inference, with Groq targeting a scale-up from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts in 2027.

The practical signal is clear: inference clouds are becoming a major financing battleground. Groq is moving from chip challenger to Nvidia cloud partner, while customers looking for AI capacity get another specialized compute provider in a market still dominated by GPU supply and data-center constraints.

Sources: Groq, TechCrunch, Bloomberg.