Groq raises $350M led by Disruptive with Nvidia participating

The round is labeled a Series A and values the company at $3.5 billion. Combined with $650 million raised in June 2026, recent funding totals $1 billion. Nvidia's participation is described as planned, not completed. A company spokesperson said the figure is a new valuation baseline, not a traditional down round. The money funds a different business from the one that raised at the 2025 peak. Groq lost much of its chip engineering team and moved toward running data centers powered by Nvidia hardware. Nvidia hired founder and CEO Jonathan Ross and other key staff under a licensing deal. The company runs 13 data centers and plans to grow capacity from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts by 2027. That puts it beside Nvidia-backed neoclouds such as CoreWeave, Lambda and Nebius. Questions about neocloud profitability, including debt and capital spending, remain open. For founders, the round shows that inference capacity is still scarce enough for a restructured vendor to raise $1 billion in about two months. Executive chairman Alex Davis said the focus will be supporting the most important model makers. That suggests larger customers will get priority. Smaller teams should compare pricing and capacity guarantees across providers, and should check how dependent each provider is on Nvidia supply.