Groq has raised $650 million in new growth funding as it works to expand its AI inference cloud business and increase capacity across its global data center footprint. The round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum, with additional backing from investors who chose to reinvest in the company.
The company said the money will help accelerate the buildout of its existing infrastructure and support a goal of reaching 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027. Groq already operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, and says its platform serves more than five million developers as well as thousands of AI-native companies.
Groq is positioning itself around AI inference, the process of running models after they are trained. The company argues that this part of the market will become much larger than training over time, with demand for compute expected to rise sharply as AI systems move into production use.
According to Groq, inference requires fast responses, high reliability and lower costs, which it believes its technology is designed to deliver. The company says its infrastructure already handles trillions of tokens each week.
The latest funding is intended to speed deployment of Groq's newest inference technology across its current data center network, including systems based on NVIDIA's new LPX platform. Groq said the financing follows a period in which it narrowed its strategic focus to building what it calls a leading AI inference cloud.
That push comes after a non-exclusive licensing deal with NVIDIA announced in December 2025. NVIDIA later said its LPX platform would incorporate Groq's inference technology.
Groq also said it is adding senior executives to support the next phase of expansion. Alan Rice has joined as chief operating officer. He previously worked at xAI, now SpaceXAI, and Meta Datacenters, and earlier served in U.S. Navy nuclear submarine operations.
The company plans to bring in Sinclair Schuller as chief technology officer and Rakesh Malhotra as chief product officer in July. Schuller founded the enterprise cloud platform Apprenda and later co-founded Nuvalence, which was acquired by EY in 2024. Malhotra spent about a decade at Microsoft working on cloud, data center management and enterprise storage products.
Groq said the additions strengthen a team that already includes chief executive Adam Winter and chief financial officer Matt Eng. The company is chaired by Alex Davis, founder and CEO of Disruptive.
Investors backing the round said they expect inference to become a major infrastructure market as AI adoption shifts from experimentation to production. Groq said its combination of hardware, software and operating expertise gives it an edge in that environment.
Founded in 2016, Groq has built its business around its LPU, or language processing unit, and its GroqCloud service. The company says it works with infrastructure and data center partners worldwide to deploy capacity at scale while remaining an independent U.S.-based company.