AI ChipsStartups Groq An announcement was released on Monday, announcing the latest completion of $640 million (currently about RMB 4.567 billion)Financing, with the goal of creating a new chip that can handle tasks such as AI reasoning faster.
After completing this round of financing, Groq has raised more than $1 billion in total, with a company valuation of $2.8 billion (currently about RMB 19.983 billion). It was reported that the company initially planned to raise $300 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion, but the company's AI chips were recognized by investors, so they increased their investment.
Groq successfully raised US$300 million in April 2021, led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital Partners. At that time, the company's valuation was around US$1 billion. Now the company's valuation has risen again, nearly three times that of 2021.
Groq also announced today that Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, will serve as a technical advisor to Groq, and Stuart Pann, former head of Intel’s foundry business and former chief information officer at HP, will join the startup as chief operating officer.
LeCun’s appointment was somewhat unexpected given Meta’s investments in its own AI chips, but it certainly gives Groq a powerful ally in this hotly competitive field.
Groq plans to create a language processing unit (LPU) inference engine that can run existing generative AI models with an architecture similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4o, 10 times faster than conventional processors and one-tenth the energy consumption.
Groq launched a developer platform called GroqCloud powered by LPU, which provides many open source models, including Meta's Llama 3.1 series, Google's Gemma, OpenAI's Whisper and Mistral's Mixtral, etc., and supports customers to use its chip's API in cloud instances.
As of July, GroqCloud has more than 356,000 developers; Groq said that part of the proceeds from this round of financing will be used to expand production capacity and add new models and features.