The new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia, values the company at $3.5 billion. That's down from the $6.9 billion Groq was valued at last September, just a few months before Nvidia hired the startup's founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, and other top talent as part of a $20 billion licensing deal that the company paid out to investors. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that despite the difference in valuation, the company doesn't see it as a down round, but rather as establishing a new valuation for the 'post-Nvidia-licensing-deal version of Groq.' Groq was focused on building its own chips, dubbed LPUs (language processing units), to compete with Nvidia on inference ' the type of compute needed to run AI workloads in real time. After it lost its star team, Groq shifted from being a pure AI chipmaker into a cloud and data center provider that operates Nvidia systems. Today, Groq operates 13 data centers across North America,...
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