The man who built Groq handed its technology to NVIDIA, now his old company raised $650M to fight back without him — TFN

The man who built Groq handed its technology to NVIDIA, now his old company raised $650M to fight back…

Groq raised $650 million for its AI inference cloud after founder Jonathan Ross and 90% of engineering departed to NVIDIA in a $20 billion licensing deal, leaving a reconstituted team to scale custom LPU silicon. With inference markets projected to grow from $106B to $255B by 2030, Groq is betting that production-scale inference—not training—will become the largest infrastructure opportunity, competing on operational expertise and purpose-built silicon against NVIDIA's dominance.