Nvidia Ai Chip Challenger Groq raises more than expected, and the evaluation of $ 6.9

AI Chip Startup Groq certain Wednesday that it raised $ 750 million of funding in post -money evaluation of $ 6.9 billion.

this Rumor numbers topped When Word leaked in July that Groq was raising. At the time, reports indicated that the increase will be about $ 600 million, in nearly $ 6 billion rating.

Groq, which also sells computing power in the data center, previously Uplast $ 640 million, with an evaluation of $ 2.8 billion In August 2024, this made more than twice the evaluation within about a year. Groq has now raised more than $ 3 billion so far, Pitchbook estimates.

Groq has been a hot commodity because it is working to break the scheme with the AI ​​NVIDIA chip maker on the technology industry. Groq chips are not graphics processing units, graphics processing units that usually operate artificial intelligence systems. Instead, GROQ LPUS, (Language Processing Units) is called the Inference Engine – Specialized Computers to run artificial intelligence models quickly and efficiently.

Its products are directed towards developers and institutions, and they are available either as a cloud service or a group of local devices. Local devices are a server rack equipped with a set of integrated contracts for devices/programs. Both cloud devices and local devices operate open versions of common models, such as those in Meta, Deepseek, QWEN, Mistral, Google and Openai. Groq says that its shows maintain, or in some cases, to improve the performance of artificial intelligence at a much lower cost than alternatives.

Groq founder, Jonathan Ross, has a particularly relevant proportions for this work. Ross has previously worked in Google to develop the mortar processing unit chip, which is specialized processors designed for machine learning tasks. TPU was announced in 2016, in the same year GROQ Out of the ghost. Tpus Google Cloud’s AI remains.

Groq says it is now working to run artificial intelligence applications for more than two million developers, an increase of 356,000 developers when the company is I spoke to Techcrunch A year ago.

The new tour led the sabotage investment company, with additional funding from Blackrock, NeuBerger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and others. The current investors, including Samsung, Cisco, D1 and Altimeter, have joined the tour.