Groq Raises $750 Mn to Scale AI Inference Chips, Hits $6.9B Valuation

Groq Inc., a developer of artificial intelligence inference chips, has raised $750 million in fresh funding, valuing the company at $6.9 billion, up from $2.8 billion last year. The new funding will expand its cloud infrastructure.

The round was led by Databricks investor Disruptive, with participation from Cisco Systems, Samsung Electronics, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and others.

Groq’s flagship product is the Language Processing Unit (LPU), a processor designed to run AI inference workloads with up to 10x higher energy efficiency than traditional GPUs.

The company credits this to its custom compiler, which pre-assigns tasks to circuits before workloads launch, reducing overhead and freeing more compute power for inference. Groq claims the LPU can support models with 1 trillion parameters.

“Inference is defining this era of AI, and we’re building the American infrastructure that delivers it with high speed and low cost,” Jonathan Ross, Groq Founder and CEO, said.

Groq sells its chips through the GroqRack appliance, a nine-server system requiring less networking hardware and data center upgrades than rivals. It also offers GroqCloud, a cloud platform for API-based AI model access.