BlockBeats News, August 17th, U.S. AI chip company Groq has completed a $350 million financing, with a valuation of $3.5 billion, a significant drop from last year's peak of $6.9 billion. This round of financing was led by Dallas-based investment company Disruptive, with participation from Nvidia. Previously, Nvidia had reached a licensing agreement with Groq and hired its founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, and several key employees. Groq is currently shifting towards data center operations, focusing on providing computing power for AI inference needs, and plans to expand its data center total capacity to over 200 megawatts by next year.

Groq, founded by former Google engineer Jonathan Ross, focuses on designing LPUs (Language Processing Units) optimized for AI inference, and provides high-speed, low-latency GroqCloud inference cloud services. By the end of 2025, Nvidia had reached a technology licensing agreement with Groq for about $20 billion and hired away the core team, after which Groq became an Nvidia cloud partner.