Groq

Groq, Inc. was founded in 2016 by a group of former Google engineers led by Jonathan Ross, one of the designers of Google's Tensor Processing Unit, together with Douglas Wightman, a former engineer at Google X who served as the company's first chief executive. The company set out to build a deterministic AI accelerator, originally called the Tensor Streaming Processor and later marketed as the Language Processing Unit, or LPU, designed specifically for inference rather than for training.

For its first several years Groq was principally a semiconductor company. It selected Samsung Electronics' foundry in Taylor, Texas to manufacture its next-generation 4-nanometre parts in August 2023, acquired the dataflow systems specialist Maxeler Technologies in March 2022, and acquired Definitive Intelligence in March 2024 to staff a new cloud business unit. GroqCloud, the developer platform that rents access to those chips through an API, was soft-launched on 19 February 2024.

In December 2025 the company's trajectory changed. Nvidia agreed to acquire assets from Groq in a transaction reported by CNBC at approximately $20 billion, which Groq itself described as a non-exclusive licensing agreement covering its inference technology. Founder Jonathan Ross and president Sunny Madra moved to Nvidia along with other members of the team. GroqCloud continued to operate, and the remaining company was rebuilt around it.

What trades today is therefore a different business from the chip designer of 2021. Groq now describes itself as a neocloud for inference, operating bare-metal AI infrastructure rather than designing silicon. It reports 13 data centres across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, more than six million developers on GroqCloud, and trillions of tokens generated each week. In August 2026 it became a certified Nvidia Cloud Partner and said it was among the first to bring Nvidia's Groq 3 LPX and Vera Rubin NVL72 systems to market.

The capital structure was reset alongside the business. Groq raised $650 million in June 2026, led by Disruptive and Infinitum with participation from existing holders, and closed a $350 million Series A in August 2026 at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia. A new executive team was installed in mid-2026 under chief executive Adam Winter, with Alex Davis, founder and chief executive of Disruptive, as executive chairman.