AI chip startup Groq recently announced it has completed $650 million in new funding, a move previously confirmed by related reports. The round was led by Dallas-based late-stage investment giant Disruptive, whose founder Alex Davis also serves as Groq’s chairman; Florida hedge fund Infinitum participated in the financing. This funding comes just about six months after Nvidia reached an agreement with Groq. In December last year, Nvidia signed a non-exclusive technical licensing deal with Grog, gaining access to its Language Processing Unit (LPU) chips and poaching core talent including Founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, among others. Groq did not disclose its latest valuation; prior to this round, its valuation stood at $6.9 billion following a previous $750 million fundraising effort in September 2024. Ross came from Google, where he contributed to the development of Google's AI chip TPU, co-founding Groq ten years ago alongside fellow ex-Googler Doug Wightman. Following the Nvidia transaction, Wightman remained with the company and assumed the role of CEO. Subsequently, Nvidia launched the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference hardware system based on Groq technology during its GTC conference in March. Facing the situation of sharing its core technological IP, Groq has shifted its business focus toward "Neocloud" inference services. This segment operates thirteen data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, serving over five million developers and thousands of AI companies while processing trillions of tokens weekly. Amidst significant management changes, Groq brought in former xAI and Meta executive Alan Rice as COO, Apprenda co-founder Sinclair Schuller as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra, who possesses background experience in Microsoft Cloud Computing, as Chief Product Officer (CPO). Analysts point out that despite fierce competition in the field of inference technologies, demand remains robust, suggesting there is still potential for success in Groq’s transformation efforts. Previously, Scale AI achieved a rebound in operations after undergoing Meta’s approximately $14.3 billion “acqui-hire” deal.