Groq raises $650M led by Infinitum and Disruptive

Existing investors also reinvested in the round. Disruptive and Infinitum already had representatives on Groq's board. The announcement came June 22. The money will pay to fit out the current data center network with newer inference technology, including NVIDIA's LPX system. Groq runs 13 data centers on four continents and serves more than five million developers. Management has also changed: Disruptive's Alex Davis is chairman, and Alan Rice, formerly of xAI and Meta, joined as COO. The round follows a reset. In December, Nvidia licensed the technology behind Groq's processor and hired several key employees, including the founding CEO. Reports put the licensing deal at $20 billion. Groq has since shifted from selling chips to selling inference capacity as a cloud provider. For AI founders, the main risk to Groq is its moat. Other cloud providers could deploy Nvidia's LPX systems and offer similar inference performance, which would weaken Groq's technical edge. Buyers of inference can expect more suppliers competing on price and speed. Founders building on inference APIs should still check benchmarks and committed capacity, not only the announcement.