Nvidia poached Groq's brain, now Groq just wants its cloud
Groq just raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, half of what it was worth last September, and the reason is deliciously brutal: Nvidia paid $20 billion to license Groq's tech and hire away founder Jonathan Ross plus his top team. Left without its star chip talent, Groq pivoted from building its own AI chips to becoming a "neocloud," renting out Nvidia GPUs to developers instead. It now runs 13 data centers and plans to more than triple its power capacity by 2027, betting inference demand keeps booming even as rivals like CoreWeave struggle to turn hype into profit.
Nothing says confidence in your chip startup like getting outbid for your own CEO.