Nvidia paid Groq $20 billion and took its top engineers. Now Groq is raising $650 million for what's left.

TL;DRAfter Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire, Groq is raising $650M from existing investors for its inference cloud. Two backers guarantee the round.

Groq is raising $650 million from existing investors to fund its inference cloud business, Axios reported. The raise comes six months after Nvidia struck a $20 billion not-acqui-hire that paid out Groq’s investors in cash, took several senior engineers, and licensed Groq’s hardware technology.

The same investors who were cashed out in December have now been asked to reinvest. Disruptive and Infinitium have agreed to fill the round if other existing investors decline their pro-rata shares. The funding is, in effect, guaranteed.

The company is being led on an interim basis by CEO Adam Winter and CFO Matt Eng. Several top-level senior employees departed to Nvidia as part of the December deal. What remains is Groq’s inference cloud business, which lets developers and enterprises host inference-heavy applications on Groq’s proprietary Language Processing Unit hardware.

Inference, the processing that happens after an AI prompt is submitted, is now a much larger market than model training. Every ChatGPT query, every Claude response, every AI agent action requires inference compute. The economics favour purpose-built silicon that can deliver tokens at lower cost and higher speed than general-purpose GPUs.