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Cailianshe News, August 6 (Editor: Zhao Hao)On Monday (August 5th) local time, American artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup Groq raised US$640 million in its latest round of financing, and the company's valuation reached US$2.8 billion.

Specifically, this round of financing was led by BlackRock Private Equity Partners, with participation from Cisco's Cisco Investments and Samsung Electronics' Samsung Catalyst Fund.

Source: Groq official website

In this Series D financing, Groq's valuation reached US$2.8 billion, more than double the US$1.1 billion in its last financing in 2021.

In addition, Meta's chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun will become Groq's technical advisor; former HP and Intel executive Stuart Pann will also join Groq as chief operating officer.

It is understood that Groq's product is the "language processing unit" (LPU). The company once claimed that "the inference speed of running large models on Groq is 10 times or even higher than that of Nvidia GPU", which means that the company's goal is to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI ​​chip market.

However, it should be pointed out that Groq is an AI chip specially designed for large language models. Its outstanding advantage is in speeding up the response of chatbots, but its comprehensive capabilities may still lag behind those of NVIDIA A100, H100 and other GPUs.

Jonathan Ross, CEO of Groq, said the new funds will be used to increase the company's computing power, with 108,000 LPUs to be launched by the end of March 2025. He also mentioned that the company's goal is to process half of the world's AI inference tasks by the end of next year.

"We hope that every dollar spent on hardware will bring a good return. We don't intend to do a business that loses money," Ross said. "We have been looking for investors who can cooperate with us for a long time, and BlackRock has businesses in both public and private equity and will play a key role.

Groq has been seeking new funding and has been in discussions with investors for several months, according to people familiar with the matter. Since the company has not yet generated significant revenue, investment in it is basically a bet on its technology.

At the "Middle East Digital Davos" LEAP Summit in March this year, Aramco Digital, a technology company under Saudi Aramco, signed a number of cooperation contracts, including jointly building the world's largest AI computing center with Groq.

Ross also mentioned that the open source model promoted by LeCun is very important to the industry, which is why Groq has grown. "Without open source, Groq would not exist today."

“We make the best chips, but if we don’t have the software, we can’t prove it.” He pointed out that Meta’s Llama model is open source, allowing people entering the AI ​​industry to avoid having to train models themselves.

(Cailianshe Zhao Hao)