By Cristian Dina
Publication Date: 2026-08-17 16:33:00
Groq, the AI-inference chip company that spent the better part of a decade pitching itself as the scrappy alternative to Nvidia, has raised fresh money at a valuation that quietly concedes how much has changed.
The company announced on Monday that they took in $350m at a $3.5bn valuation, roughly half the $6.9bn it commanded last September.
The round was led by Disruptive, the Dallas firm whose founder Alex Davis is now Groq’s executive chairman, and, in a twist that would be difficult to invent, Nvidia itself joined in.
Only months earlier Nvidia had licensed Groq’s technology and hired away much of its talent, an episode we covered when the company first set about picking up the pieces.
Late last year Nvidia struck a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s language-processing-unit technology, a deal widely reported at around $20bn and just as widely described as a “not-acqui-hire”.
There was no outright purchase of the company. Instead Nvidia secured the intellectual-property rights it wanted and walked off with founder and chief executive Jonathan Ross, a former Google engineer who had helped build that company’s tensor chips, together with a good part of the senior team.
What remained needed a new plan and new people. Co-founder Doug Wightman stepped up as chief executive, a fresh bench of executives was recruited, and Groq repositioned itself less as a chip designer squaring up to Nvidia and more as a data-centre operator…
