Groq has secured $650 million in funding to help expand its AI cloud offering.The funding round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum, and saw participation from existing investors.Groq was previously known for its AI chip business, but has since pivoted to focus on an AI cloud offering after Nvidia licensed its technology, later becoming the Language Processing Unit (LPU) chip.According to Groq, following this, the company, along with its lead investors, decided to "sharpen the company's strategic focus" with the aim of "building the world's leading AI inference cloud.Currently, Groq operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the APAC region.The new funding will be used to support the fit-out of Groq's existing data centers with the company's "latest inference technology," including the LPX system from Nvidia. Currently, Groq is on target to have 200MW of compute capacity by the end of 2027.Alex Davis, Groq chairman and founder and CEO of Disruptive, said: "Groq has spent years building the technology, infrastructure, and operational expertise required for the next phase of AI. Today, the company has a proven global platform, a world-class leadership team, and a clear strategy focused on one of the most important opportunities in technology: AI inference at scale. We believe that combination positions Groq to become a foundational layer of the AI economy."In addition to the funding, Groq is adding some new names to its senior leadership team. Alan Rice - formerly of xAI and Meta - has joined as chief operating officer, while in July, the company will appoint Sinclair Schuller as CTO and Rakesh Malhotra as chief product officer.Groq is a known customer of Equinix data centers, having leased capacity at a facility in Helsinki, Finland, in 2025. Elsewhere, the company has a presence in the US (Equinix, TierPoint, and DataBank), Canada (Bell Canada), and Saudi Arabia (Humain).In October 2025, the company said it was aiming to set up more than 12 data centers in the next year.Groq was co-founded in 2016 by Jonathon Ross, who previously helped lead Google's Tensor Processing Unit development. The company provides dedicated chips and accelerators within its own servers and racks designed for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing.