Groq raises $350M at $3.5B, half its value before Nvidia took its CEO
Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive, with Nvidia expected to participate, at a $3.5B valuation — down from $6.9B in September 2025, after Nvidia's $20B licensing deal pulled founder and CEO Jonathan Ross and the core LPU team. The chip challenger is now an Nvidia reseller: 13 data centers scaling from 54 to over 200 megawatts by 2027, in the same capital-hungry neocloud tier as CoreWeave, Lambda, and Nebius, where debt loads and fast-depreciating hardware leave the return math unproven.
Source: techcrunch.com ↗
We are 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.
Alex Davis, chairman and CEO of Disruptive
Why this matters
- → Groq abandoned its AI chip strategy after losing founder to Nvidia.
- → Now competes as an Nvidia reseller in the capital-intensive neocloud market.
- → Valuation collapse signals investor skepticism about hardware-heavy AI infrastructure returns.
Pivot or pivot away?