AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire deal

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. On Monday, Groq announced a new $650 million funding round, confirming earlier reports . The 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 in September. Ross, who came from Google, was known in the AI chip world for helping create Google’s AI chip, the Tensor Processing Unit . 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. Groq 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. With Nvidia now owning the IP for LPUs, the GPU giant announced its own hardware cluster, the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference hardware system, at its GTC event in March. In response, Groq has pivoted to its neocloud business, it said. …