Groq closes $350 million Series A at a $3.5 billion valuation, half its 2025 peak

Groq closed a $350 million Series A on Aug. 17 led by Dallas investment firm Disruptive, with Nvidia participating, valuing the AI inference company at $3.5 billion. That is roughly half its $6.9 billion peak from September 2025.

The lower valuation reflects a hard year. After that 2025 high, Nvidia struck a chip-licensing deal with Groq and hired away founder Jonathan Ross and other staff in December 2025, pushing the company to reposition. The round, announced by Groq, follows a separate $650 million raise in June, bringing recent fundraising to about $1 billion.

The money underwrites a pivot: from designing its own AI chips to operating a so-called neocloud that resells Nvidia-based computing for training and inference. Groq said the funds will support customers seeking medium and larger clusters of Nvidia-accelerated capacity, and fund an expansion of its data-center footprint from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts in 2027.

“Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure,” said Alex Davis, Groq’s executive chairman and the chief executive of lead investor Disruptive, who called the company “the world’s leading AI inference cloud.”

The halved valuation is the tell. Reselling Nvidia capacity is a lower-margin, more crowded business than owning a differentiated chip, and Groq now competes with a field of neoclouds for the same GPUs. Whether it hits the 200-megawatt target in 2027 will be an early gauge of demand for its cloud.