Chipmaker Groq Nears $6bn Valuation with Fresh $600m Raise Amid Growing AI Hardware Momentum

The CHIPMAKER GROQ is on the right track to close a major financing tour which would increase around $ 600 million, which increased its valuation to almost $ 6 billion, more than double its value of a year ago.

According to familiar sources with the question, cited by Bloomberg, the increase is led by the venture capital company based in Austin, which would contribute to more than $ 300 million around. Although the agreement is not yet finalized and the terms can change, it signals one of the most aggressive jumps of the evaluation for a material startup of AI in recent memory.

Groq raised capital for the last time in August 2024, pulling $ 640 million from an assessment of $ 2.8 billion in a round by BlackRock. This investment tour has also aroused the participation of the main players, including Neuberger Berman, Cisco Investments, Samsung Catalyst Fund, KDDI and One Ventures type. With this new agreement, Groq would bring its total funding to more than $ 2 billion.

Founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, a former Google engineer who helped to design the tensor treatment unit of the research giant (TPU), Groq has emerged from stealth in order to build high performance chips specifically adapted to AI inference tasks which are based on pre-formulated AI models and at high speed. Ross’s vision was materialized in the GROQ language treatment unit (LPU), a tailor-designed processor designed for ultra-fast and deterministic inference. The LPU has since become a central part of GROQ’s height to customers looking for a low latency evolving infrastructure to take charge of large languages.

The recent growth of the company has been fueled by historical partnerships. In April, GROQ signed an agreement with META to provide an AI infrastructure aimed at accelerating inference performance for Meta’s LLAMA 4 model. The following month, GROQ announced a strategic partnership with Bell Canada to support the national infrastructure initiative of the telecommunications giant. But perhaps more particularly, Groq would have obtained a commitment of $ 1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, part of a sovereign initiative to strengthen the national capacity of AI. This agreement alone should generate around $ 500 million in revenue for Groq in 2025.

These movements positioned the Groq as one of the most formidable challengers in Nvidia, which dominates the AI fleas market with its GPUs. While Nvidia controls a large part of the training and inference pipeline, startups like Groq are starting to cut a niche by focusing on the acceleration of inference, an increasingly crucial aspect of the deployment of large scale.

Was the LPU of Groq compared to execute Meta’s Llama? 2? 70B Model at more than 100 tokens per second, a figure that highlights the company’s ability to support real -scale applications on a large scale, AI chatbots to point to computer tasks.

Despite its technical progress, Groq remained a relatively silent force compared to other material players. The company employs around 250 people, with operations in the United States and an international expansion presence. But the last increase – if finished – obtains a moment of transition to adulthood, raising it in a rare class of private AI infrastructure companies with evaluations of several billion dollars and active deployments.

The main disruptive investment is also considered a significant change in the appetite of investors to highly specialized AI material solutions. The reported commitment of $ 300 million in the company suggests strong confidence in Groq’s ability to evolve rapidly, even if the wider company market remains cautious in the middle of geopolitical tension and volatility in the flea supply chain.

Groq’s ambition is simply global. CEO Jonathan Ross said he expects the company to send up to 2 million BPU by the end of 2025, aimed at fueling more than half of the world’s IT needs. It remains to be seen if this target is achievable, but the extent of partnerships and the financing of the company suggests that Groq is no longer a startup with an experimental chip – it is becoming an cornerstone of the new generation IA infrastructure.

Neither groq nor disruptor publicly commented on the agreement, but sources close to negotiations expect the financing cycle to end in the coming weeks.