{"slug": "ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire", "title": "AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire deal", "summary": "AI chipmaker Groq confirmed a $650 million funding round led by Disruptive and Infinitum, six months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing deal for its technology and poached key talent including founder Jonathan Ross. Groq is pivoting to its neocloud business, which now operates 13 data centers and serves millions of developers, as it hires new executives to replace those lost to Nvidia.", "body_md": "What does an AI company do after one of those not-acqui-hire deals, where a rival pays investors a hefty IP “licensing” fee while poaching its critical talent? For AI chipmaker Groq, the answer appears to be raise more money from investors — who were said to have profited handsomely after a deal with Nvidia in December — hire more talent, and pivot.\n\nOn Monday, Groq [announced](https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-raises-usd650m-to-scale-its-ai-inference-cloud-business) a new $650 million funding round, confirming [earlier reports](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/29/after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire-ai-chip-startup-groq-reportedly-raising-650m/). The round was led by Disruptive, a Dallas-based late-stage investment firm founded by Alex Davis — who also serves as Groq’s chairman — and Infinitum, a Fort Lauderdale hedge fund.\n\nThe raise comes roughly six months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s technology and hired away founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees. Groq did not disclose its new valuation. It was last valued at $6.9 billion following a [$750 million round](https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/nvidia-ai-chip-challenger-groq-raises-even-more-than-expected-hits-6-9b-valuation/) in September.\n\nRoss, who came from Google, was known in the AI chip world for helping create Google’s AI chip, the [Tensor Processing Unit](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/google-cloud-next-new-tpu-ai-chips-compete-with-nvidia/). He teamed up with another Google engineer, Doug Wightman, to launch Groq a decade ago. Wightman stayed on after the Nvidia deal and became CEO.\n\nGroq created a chip it called a language processing unit (LPU), used for inference, and sold it as part of a cloud service or an on-premises hardware cluster.\n\nWith Nvidia now owning the IP for LPUs, the GPU giant announced its own hardware cluster, the [Nvidia Groq 3 LPX ](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/lpx/)inference hardware system, at its GTC event in March.\n\nIn response, Groq has pivoted to its neocloud business, it said. That business had been run by Madra after Groq acquired his AI data analytics company Definitive Intelligence, in 2024. It has grown to 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC and is serving over five million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of tokens each week, the company says.\n\nGroq has also been hiring replacement execs. It added Alan Rice as COO, previously at xAI and Meta, after a career in the U.S. Navy.\n\nIt also added an entrepreneurial duo, Sinclair Schuller, who joins as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO. They previously worked together at Apprenda, an enterprise cloud software company founded by Schuller; they then co-founded Nuvalence, a software-engineering firm acquired by EY in 2024. Malhotra previously spent about a decade working on Microsoft’s cloud products.\n\nWhether Groq can succeed after almost selling itself depends on how competitive its inference cloud can remain, now that the key hardware IP is shared with Nvidia. Certainly, it has a shot. Inference-related tech is an area experiencing tremendous demand (and [VC investment](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/ai-inference-startup-baseten-reportedly-raising-1-5b-months-after-its-last-mega-round/)). But it’s also seeing increasing innovation and competition.\n\nStill, others seem to have survived these sorts of deals. Scale AI’s CEO Jason Droege told [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/05/14/scale-meta-deal/) that business has rebounded [after Meta did a $14.3 billion not-acqui-hire](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/cracks-are-forming-in-metas-partnership-with-scale-ai/) about a year ago, and that the company is on track to do $1 billion in revenue.\n\nIn the big-money game of AI, anything seems possible.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire", "canonical_source": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire-deal/", "published_at": "2026-06-22 20:13:58+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-24 00:56:03.625776+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-chips", "ai-startups", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-products", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Groq", "Nvidia", "Disruptive", "Infinitum", "Jonathan Ross", "Alan Rice", "Sinclair Schuller", "Rakesh Malhotra"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-chipmaker-groq-confirms-650m-raise-re-staffs-after-nvidias-20b-not-acqui-hire.jsonld"}}