Mountain View, CA - Sep 17, 2025 (UTC) - AI inference pioneer Groq today announced $750 million in new financing at a post-money valuation of $6.9 billion. This topped the rumored numbers when word leaked in July that Groq was raising. At that time, reports suggested that the raise would be about $600 million, at near a $6 billion valuation.
The round was led by Disruptive with significant investment from Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and a large US-based West Coast mutual fund manager. The raise also included continued support from Samsung, Cisco, D1, Altimeter, 1789 Capital and Infinitum.
Groq, which also sells data center computing power, previously raised $640 million at a $2.8 billion valuation in August 2024, making this more than double the valuation in about a year. Groq has now raised over $3 billion to date, PitchBook estimates.
“Inference is defining this era of AI, and we’re building the American infrastructure that delivers it with high speed and low cost,” said Jonathan Ross, Groq Founder and CEO.
Groq has been a hot commodity because it is working on breaking the chokehold that AI chip maker Nvidia has over the tech industry. Groq’s chips are not GPUs, the graphics processing units that typically power AI systems. Instead, Groq calls them LPUs, (language processing units) and calls its hardware an inference engine — specialized computers optimized for running AI models quickly and efficiently.
The investment strengthens Groq’s position in what it calls the American AI Stack, enabling the company to deliver fast, affordable compute worldwide. Groq powers more than two million developers and Fortune 500 companies with fast, affordable compute and is growing its presence globally, building on existing data centers in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Its products are geared toward developers and enterprises, available as either a cloud service or an on-premises hardware cluster. The on-prem hardware is a server rack outfitted with a stack of its integrated hardware/software nodes. Both the cloud and on-prem hardware run open versions of popular models, like those from Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Google and OpenAI. Groq says its offerings maintain, or in some cases improve, AI performance at significantly less cost than alternatives.
Disruptive, a Dallas-based growth investment firm, has backed some of the most transformative and successful companies in the last decade, including large investments in Palantir, Airbnb, Spotify, Shield AI, Hims, Databricks, Stripe, Slack and many other AI leaders and AI adjacent businesses. Disruptive has invested nearly $350 million in Groq.
“As AI expands, the infrastructure behind it will be as essential as the models themselves. Groq is building that foundation, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Jonathan and his team in this next chapter of explosive growth,” said Alex Davis, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Disruptive.
Groq’s founder, Jonathan Ross, has a particularly relevant pedigree for this work. Ross previously worked at Google developing its Tensor Processing Unit chip, which are specialized processors designed for machine learning tasks. The TPU was announced in 2016, the same year Groq emerged from stealth.
The funding comes as the White House recently issued an executive order promoting the export of the American AI Technology Stack, emphasizing the global deployment of US-origin AI technology. Groq is positioning itself as playing a central role in this initiative with their American-built inference infrastructure already powering developers and enterprises worldwide.
About Groq
Groq is the inference infrastructure that powers AI with the speed and cost it requires. Founded in 2016, the company created the LPU and GroqCloud to ensure compute is faster and more affordable. Today, Groq is a key part of the American AI Stack and trusted by more than two million developers and many of the world’s leading Fortune 500 companies.
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