June 1, 2026
Bought-ish, broke-ish, back for more
How the hell is Groq raising more money?
After the Nvidia "acquisition," Groq is back asking for $650M and commenters are baffled
TLDR: Groq is trying to raise $650 million after Nvidia licensed its technology and hired key staff, leaving the remaining company to run four AI data centers. Commenters are split between seeing a clever business move and calling it confusing, overpriced, and unreliable — which matters because Groq is now selling itself as infrastructure, not magic.
The real spectacle here isn’t just Groq trying to raise $650 million after many people thought Nvidia had already bought it — it’s the comment section going full detective mode. The basic plot, per Axios, is weird-but-legal: Nvidia didn’t buy the whole company. It licensed Groq’s chip tech, hired much of the brain trust, and left behind a smaller Groq that still runs four AI data centers and sells super-fast AI responses. So yes, the company sort of “exited,” but also… didn’t. Naturally, the crowd responded with a giant “wait, what?”
That confusion became the main event. One commenter flat-out said they were “confused by the confusion,” while another got stuck on the strange corporate shell game: is this the same Groq, a new Groq, or Groq: The Sequel? Others were less philosophical and more brutal. One user basically said Groq’s service is a bad deal for customers, calling the performance poor for the price. Another went scorched-earth with a horror story about “random errors” and “silly quirks,” turning the thread from finance mystery into product roast.
Still, defenders showed up swinging. One argued Groq’s speed is exactly why Nvidia paid big money in the first place, and said the fundraising is actually reassuring because it means customers won’t be abandoned. Even moderator dang had to step in early with a classy “please don’t post shallow-indignant comments” plea, which is always a sign the drama has already entered the building. In other words: investors may see valuable data centers, but the community sees a messy, fascinating rerun of Did they get bought or not?
Key Points
- •The article says Groq is raising $650 million even though Nvidia previously licensed its technology and hired key technical executives rather than acquiring the whole company.
- •Groq’s remaining business is described as operating four datacenters and an inference API focused on very fast inference for smaller models.
- •The article says Groq’s architecture relies on an all-SRAM approach without large HBM capacity, enabling high tokens-per-second but making frontier-model serving expensive.
- •Existing AI datacenter capacity is presented as strategically valuable because new datacenter construction is being slowed by regulation, power limits, and operational complexity.
- •The article argues that Groq’s valuation case rests more on its datacenter assets and operating team than on unique chip advantages, especially since Nvidia now sells newer chips based on Groq’s architecture.