How is Groq raising more money?

Groq stopped serving Kimi K2 (1T params) when they got aquihired by NVIDIA, so I guess NVIDIA took most of the hardware in addition to the employees. The largest model they serve now is the relatively minuscule gpt-oss-120b.

The community support forum is also getting retired and there haven't been any posts by support employees in forever anyway, so they are probably gone, too. Also, the number of issues have been piling up, suggesting that the developers are gone as well. https://community.groq.com/c/forum/4 (archive link for when it goes down https://web.archive.org/web/20260602064050/https://community...)

To me, it looks they are trying to raise 650M with a few remaining (ancient) LPUs and no employees.

I don't really get the value proposition of groq as a user, the performance is really poor for the token price. Data centres on the other hand are becoming a commodity, and I don't see any reason a priori to invest in groq specifically for something like that.

My company had a really terrible experience trying to use Groq, and I would NOT recommend anyone use their service if you need reliability. So many random errors, so many silly quirks.

as soon as i saw they switched to "call us for quotes" for the new models, i knew they are over.

I don’t understand one part of the licensing here: if it was just a license, can’t they relicense the software and hardware of LPU3 to AMD? Or hire new software and hardware people?

The new designs were their main asset besides the amazing talent that went to NVIDIA, not the remaining DCs.

The most bizarre thing here is the reporters. They intentionally misrepresented what happened. All the news stories from last year claimed Nvidia "acquired" Groq - and in the same story, quoted what actually happened, and pretended it didn't. It's like the journalists had some kind of group psychosis, pretending it was an acquisition. It wasn't. It was a really white-glove product rental.

From the actual Groq PR release:

"Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia" - "As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology" - "Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer" (https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv...)

Nothing about an acquisition there. It says Nvidia is licensing it, and that others can too. The execs work for Nvidia to integrate it into Nvidia's... something. And Groq the company remains the same as before.

There's also no official source for the amount Nvidia paid for the tech, or two unofficial ones. Journalistically speaking, this is some bullshit.

Why's the deal like this? No idea. Does it make sense? No idea. But it's not odd that Groq is continuing to raise more money, because they never stopped being a normally operating company.

If you want an explanation for why Nvidia would do this deal, my best offer is here (https://openrouter.ai/rankings): Of the top 10 fastest AI models, Groq is the provider of 4 of them. And of the price of those top 10 fastest AI models, Groq is #1, #2, #3, and #5. And you wonder why someone's giving them a measly half billion dollars? They're the fastest cheapest thing on the market. If you don't understand the value of that, you really don't understand AI.

what's the confusion. Groq offers a fast inference solution that is currently unique (why do you think Nvidia paid $8 billion to end-run around the SEC to acquire the technology). This is good news as it ensures that Groq customers can can be assured continuity to use their service.

i like groq but models seem to have stagnated - looks like the company isn't focused on b2c anymore?

Do they have any good models yet?

I’m confused by the confusion. Groq licensed their technology (sold part of their business) to Nvidia for a large amount of money and distributed the spoils to their investors. Seems quite normal? But then the Axios article says…

“Existing shareholders will receive the remaining cash distributions and then have the opportunity to invest into a new company”

New company? But Groq still exists and continued to exist.

“The bottom line: Don't be surprised if this becomes a new transaction template in the AI private markets.”

A transaction template? I don’t follow what was novel about this situation. The Meta not-acquisition-acquisition of Scale seems more novel.

I guess I feel like Zach’s confusion is because of the way Axios has presented what is happening to Groq. Looking at why actually happened with Groq, it seems like Axios are reporting it weird.

Unless Groq really is starting a new company in which case I am equally as confused.

edit: when announced last year it was announced as an asset acquisition https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

Fraud. And insecure bois that wish they were Elon