Groq is raising $650 million in new funding just months after Nvidia paid $20 billion for a licensing deal that was not technically an acquisition. Several of Groq's senior executives departed for Nvidia as part of the agreement, which gave the chip giant access to Groq's hardware technology.
The new funding backs Groq's pivot toward its inference cloud business—the infrastructure that powers AI models after a user sends a prompt. Inference is where most AI revenue is generated, sources say.
Groq's interim CEO Adam Winter and CFO Matt Eng are pitching investors on a vision for developers and enterprises to host their AI inference applications on Groq's hardware. Backers including Disruptive and Infinitium have committed to guaranteeing the round if other investors do not participate.
The question is whether Groq can execute this shift without the executives who departed to Nvidia.
