Groq, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence company that designs and sells AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and related software to accelerate AI inference. The company's architecture was originally introduced as a Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP) but was later rebranded as a Language Processing Unit (LPU) following the widespread adoption of large language models after the breakthrough of ChatGPT. Groq's LPU is designed to run AI workloads such as large language models, image classification, and predictive analysis with high performance and efficiency.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Groq also maintains offices in San Jose, California; Liberty Lake, Washington; Toronto, Canada; and London, United Kingdom, with remote employees across North America and Europe. In December 2025, Nvidia and Groq announced an agreement reportedly valued at approximately US$20 billion to license Groq's AI inference technology and to transfer several senior Groq executives to Nvidia, while Groq stated it would continue to operate as an independent company.
History
Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of former Google engineers, led by Jonathan Ross, one of the designers of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), and Douglas Wightman, an entrepreneur and former engineer at Google X, who served as the company's first CEO. The company received seed funding from Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya with a $10 million investment in 2017, followed by additional funding.
In April 2021, Groq raised $300 million in a Series C round led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital Partners, valuing the company at over $1 billion and making it a unicorn. Current investors include Infinitum, The Spruce House Partnership, Addition, GCM Grosvenor, Xⁿ, Firebolt Ventures, General Global Capital, and Tru Arrow Partners, with follow-on investments from Infinitum, TDK Ventures, and XTX Ventures.
On March 1, 2022, Groq acquired Maxeler Technologies, a company known for its dataflow systems technologies. Maxeler retained its brand due to the longstanding accomplishments of Dr. Oskar Mencer and team.
On August 16, 2023, Groq selected Samsung Electronics' foundry in Taylor, Texas to manufacture its next-generation chips on Samsung's 4-nanometer (nm) process node, marking the first order at this new factory.
On February 19, 2024, Groq soft-launched a developer platform, GroqCloud, to attract developers to use the Groq API and rent access to its chips. On March 1, 2024, Groq acquired Definitive Intelligence, a startup offering business-oriented AI solutions, to support its cloud platform.
In August 2024, Groq raised $640 million in a Series D round led by BlackRock Private Equity Partners, valuing the company at $2.8 billion. On February 10, 2025, Groq announced a US$1.5 billion commitment from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to expand delivery of its LPU-based AI inference infrastructure, tied to a new GroqCloud data center in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. As of 2025, Groq had established a dozen data centers across the U.S., Canada, the Middle East, and Europe.
In December 2025, Nvidia agreed to purchase assets from Groq for approximately US$20 billion, a record for Nvidia. Groq described the deal as a non-exclusive licensing agreement. As part of the deal, Groq founder Jonathan Ross and president Sunny Madra would join Nvidia. In May 2026, Groq was reported to be raising $650 million from existing investors to fund its transition to an AI inference cloud business, with the round structured as a pro-rata offering backstopped by investors Disruptive and Infinitum.
Language Processing Unit
Groq's ASIC was initially named the Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP), codenamed "Alan," but was later rebranded by Mark Heaps, VP of Brand, and Jonathan Ross, CEO/Founder, to the Language Processing Unit (LPU) to make the nature of the processor more obvious.
The LPU features a functionally sliced microarchitecture, where memory units are interleaved with vector and matrix computation units. This design facilitates the exploitation of dataflow locality in AI compute graphs, improving execution performance and efficiency. The LPU was designed based on two key observations: AI workloads exhibit substantial data parallelism that can be mapped onto purpose-built hardware, and a deterministic processor design coupled with a producer-consumer programming model allows precise control and reasoning over hardware components, optimizing performance and energy efficiency.
The LPU also has a single-core, deterministic architecture. It avoids traditional reactive hardware components such as branch predictors, arbiters, reordering buffers, and caches, with all execution explicitly controlled by the compiler, guaranteeing deterministic execution of an LPU program.
The first generation of the LPU (TSP) yields a computational density of more than 1 TeraOp/s per square millimeter of silicon for its 25×29 mm 14nm chip operating at a nominal clock frequency of 900 MHz. The second generation (LPU v2) is manufactured on Samsung's 4nm process node.
Groq hosts open-source large language models running on its LPUs for public access, available through Groq's website and its playground for developers.
GroqCloud Platform
GroqCloud is the company's developer platform that provides API access to its LPU-based inference services. Launched in February 2024, it allows developers to rent access to Groq's chips and integrate AI inference into their applications. The platform supports various large language models and has been instrumental in attracting a developer community.
Funding and Valuation
Groq's funding history includes a $10 million seed investment in 2017, a $300 million Series C in April 2021 (valuing the company at over $1 billion), and a $640 million Series D in August 2024 (valuing the company at $2.8 billion). In February 2025, the company secured a US$1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia. In May 2026, Groq was reported to be raising $650 million from existing investors to fund its transition to an AI inference cloud business.
Partnerships and Manufacturing
Groq selected Samsung Electronics' foundry in Taylor, Texas, for manufacturing its next-generation chips on a 4nm process node, a partnership that began in August 2023. The company has also collaborated with various organizations to deploy its technology across multiple data centers globally.
See Also
- Central processing unit
- Graphics processing unit
- Tensor processing unit
References
This article is based on information from public sources, including company announcements and press releases.