AI chipmaker Groq is on track to close a major funding round that would raise approximately $600 million, boosting its valuation to nearly $6 billion—more than double its worth from just a year ago.
According to sources familiar with the matter, quoted by Bloomberg, the raise is being led by Austin-based venture firm Disruptive, which is reportedly contributing over $300 million to the round. Although the deal is not yet finalized and terms may shift, it signals one of the most aggressive jumps in valuation for an AI hardware startup in recent memory.
Groq last raised capital in August 2024, pulling in $640 million at a $2.8 billion valuation in a round led by BlackRock. That investment round also drew participation from major players, including Neuberger Berman, Cisco Investments, Samsung Catalyst Fund, KDDI, and Type One Ventures. With this new deal, Groq would bring its total funding to well over $2 billion.
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 19 (Feb 9 – May 2, 2026): big discounts for early bird.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register for Tekedia AI Lab: From Technical Design to Deployment (next edition begins Jan 24 2026).
Founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, a former Google engineer who helped design the search giant’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Groq emerged from stealth with the goal of building high-performance chips specifically tailored for AI inference tasks that rely on running pre-trained AI models efficiently and at high speed. Ross’ vision materialized in Groq’s Language Processing Unit (LPU), a custom-designed processor built for ultra-fast and deterministic inference. The LPU has since become a core part of Groq’s pitch to clients looking for scalable, low-latency infrastructure to support large language models.
The company’s recent growth has been powered by landmark partnerships. In April, Groq signed a deal with Meta to provide AI infrastructure aimed at accelerating inference performance for Meta’s Llama 4 model. The following month, Groq announced a strategic partnership with Bell Canada to support the telecom giant’s nationwide AI infrastructure initiative. But perhaps most notably, Groq reportedly secured a $1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, part of a sovereign initiative to build national AI capacity. That deal alone is expected to generate about $500 million in revenue for Groq in 2025.
These moves have positioned Groq as one of the most formidable challengers to Nvidia, which dominates the AI chip market with its GPUs. While Nvidia controls much of the training and inference pipeline, startups like Groq are beginning to carve out a niche by focusing on inference acceleration, an increasingly crucial aspect of AI deployment at scale.
Groq’s LPU has been benchmarked running Meta’s Llama?2?70B model at over 100 tokens per second, a figure that highlights the company’s ability to support large-scale real-time applications, from AI chatbots to edge computing tasks.
Despite its technical progress, Groq has remained a relatively quiet force compared to other hardware players. The company employs around 250 people, with operations across the U.S. and an expanding international presence. But the latest raise—if completed—marks a coming-of-age moment for Groq, elevating it into a rare class of privately-held AI infrastructure companies with multibillion-dollar valuations and active deployments.
Disruptive’s lead investment is also seen as a notable shift in investor appetite toward highly specialized AI hardware solutions. The firm’s reported $300 million commitment suggests strong confidence in Groq’s ability to scale quickly, even as the broader venture market remains cautious amid geopolitical tension and volatility in the chip supply chain.
Groq’s ambition is nothing short of global. CEO Jonathan Ross has said he expects the company to ship up to 2 million LPUs by the end of 2025, aiming to power more than half of the world’s inference computing needs. Whether that target is achievable remains to be seen, but the sheer magnitude of the company’s partnerships and funding suggests Groq is no longer just a startup with an experimental chip—it’s emerging as a cornerstone of next-generation AI infrastructure.
Neither Groq nor Disruptive has publicly commented on the deal, but sources close to the negotiations expect the funding round to close in the coming weeks.