Groq Raises $350 Mn to Scale AI Inference Cloud

AI Inference platform Groq has raised $350 million in a Series A funding round led by Disruptive, with planned participation from NVIDIA, valuing the AI infrastructure company at $3.5 billion.

The latest funding comes two months after Groq raised $650 million in June, bringing its funding this year to $1 billion. The company said the new capital will expand its global inference infrastructure and support customers seeking access to medium and large NVIDIA-accelerated computing clusters.

Groq currently operates 13 data centres across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. It serves more than 6 million developers, Fortune 500 companies, and thousands of AI-native companies.

The company plans to increase its power capacity from 54 megawatts currently to more than 200 megawatts in 2027.

Groq said it is an NVIDIA Cloud Partner and is certified to design, deploy, and operate NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure based on NVIDIA's reference architecture and operational standards.

Alex Davis, Groq’s Executive Chairman and CEO of Disruptive, said the company is building Groq into the world's leading AI inference cloud. “Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure.”

Davis said Groq would continue its partnership with NVIDIA and focus on supporting model makers as demand for AI inference grows.

Groq uses its language processing units (LPUs) to provide AI inference services. The company said its platform processes trillions of tokens every week across its developer, enterprise, and AI-native customer base.

Groq and NVIDIA entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement in December last year under which NVIDIA licensed Groq’s inference technology. 

Groq continues to operate independently, while its GroqCloud service remains operational. Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and several other employees joined NVIDIA as part of the agreement.