Groq has raised $350 million in fresh funding at a $3.5 billion valuation, giving the AI inference company another major cash injection as it rebuilds its business around cloud infrastructure.
The new valuation is roughly half the $6.9 billion valuation Groq reached in September 2025. The sharp drop comes less than a year after Nvidia licensed Groq’s technology and hired away its founder and several senior executives.
The new round was led by Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, with Nvidia also participating. That makes the funding particularly unusual: Nvidia is now backing a company whose original strategy was to challenge its dominance in AI chips.
The relationship changed dramatically in December. Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s inference technology in a deal widely reported at around $20 billion, while also hiring founder and CEO Jonathan Ross and other key employees. Groq remained an independent company rather than being acquired outright.
Groq has since shifted its focus. Instead of concentrating primarily on designing chips to compete with Nvidia, the company is building an AI inference cloud and positioning itself as a “neocloud” provider.
The strategy already has a sizeable base. Groq says more than five million developers use its platform, which processes trillions of tokens each week across 13 data centres. The company is targeting 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027.
The latest funding follows a $650 million round announced in June, giving Groq another substantial pool of capital to expand its inference infrastructure. The company is effectively betting that demand for running AI models will become as important as the hardware used to power them.
But the $3.5 billion valuation shows that investors are taking a more cautious view of Groq than they did last year. The company has a functioning inference business, but it is rebuilding after losing the founder and much of the leadership that drove its original chip strategy.
Nvidia’s participation adds another layer to that transition. The company is no longer simply Groq’s biggest rival; it has become a technology partner, customer-side supplier and investor in the startup’s next chapter.
For Groq, the challenge now is proving that its inference cloud can become a valuable business on its own.
The $350 million gives it more time and capital to do that. The $3.5 billion valuation, however, suggests investors are no longer pricing Groq as the next company that will dethrone Nvidia they are pricing it as a company that survived Nvidia’s intervention and found another way forward.
