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AI chip start-up Groq in fundraising talks to take on Nvidia
Semiconductor manufacturers compete in race to develop machine-learning applications
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Semiconductor start-up Groq is in talks with investors about a round of funding that would make it one of the most well-capitalised challengers to specialised artificial intelligence chipmakers such as Nvidia.
Tiger Global Management has held discussions about leading a $300m financing in Groq, valuing the company at roughly $1bn, according to people briefed on the talks.
Groq had raised $250m of the total, including convertible notes it sold to investors last year, the people said. Tiger Global and Groq declined to comment.
The investor interest in Groq underlines the high-stakes race among chipmakers hoping to power rapid developments in machine-learning applications.
Based in Silicon Valley and founded in 2016, Groq began making its technology commercially available for the first time last year. The company’s chips are geared towards so-called inference tasks, which use knowledge gained from deep learning to make predictions on new data.
Bristol-based Graphcore and Silicon Valley-based SambaNova Systems have also raised large sums to develop AI chips that compete with Nvidia’s offerings.
Groq chief executive Jonathan Ross previously co-founded a team that developed Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, a custom machine-learning chip the company uses in its data centres. Google has said the chip helped the software program AlphaGo beat the legendary Go player Lee Sedol.
In 2019, Groq claimed its “tensor streaming processor” had become the first chip able to process one quadrillion operations per second, though it has performed below those levels in customer testing.
Groq said last year it was working with customers in financial services developing autonomous vehicles, in addition to research labs, without naming them. Graphcore, which investors valued at $2.5bn in December, has struck partnerships with Dell and Microsoft.
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