What’s an AI company supposed to do after going through one of those “not-quite-an-acquisition” deals, where a competitor pays a hefty IP licensing fee to investors while scooping up its top talent? For AI chip startup Groq, the answer seems to be: raise more cash from those same investors—who reportedly made a killing from a December deal with Nvidia—bring in fresh talent, and shift strategy.

On Monday, Groq announced a new $650 million funding round, confirming earlier reports. The raise comes roughly six months after Nvidia signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq’s technology and hired away founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and several other employees. Groq didn’t disclose its new valuation; it was last valued at $6.9 billion after a $750 million round in September.

Ross, who previously worked at Google, was well known in the AI chip world for helping create Google’s Tensor Processing Unit. He teamed up with fellow Google engineer Doug Wightman to launch Groq a decade ago. Wightman stayed on after the Nvidia deal and became CEO. Groq originally developed a chip called a language processing unit (LPU), designed for inference, and sold it as part of a cloud service or on-premises hardware cluster. With Nvidia now owning the LPU IP, the GPU giant announced its own hardware cluster—the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX inference system—at its GTC event in March.

In response, Groq has pivoted to its neocloud business, the company said. That business was previously run by Madra after Groq acquired his AI data analytics firm Definitive Intelligence in 2024. It now operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC, serving over five million developers and thousands of AI companies, processing trillions of tokens each week, according to Groq.

Groq has also been hiring replacement executives. It added Alan Rice as COO, who previously worked at xAI and Meta after a career in the U.S. Navy. It also brought on an entrepreneurial duo: Sinclair Schuller as CTO and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO. They previously worked together at Apprenda, an enterprise cloud software company founded by Schuller, and later co-founded Nuvalence, a software engineering firm acquired by EY in 2024. Malhotra spent about a decade working on Microsoft’s cloud products.

Whether Groq can succeed after nearly selling itself depends on how competitive its inference cloud can remain, now that the key hardware IP is shared with Nvidia. It certainly has a shot. Inference technology is an area experiencing tremendous demand—and VC investment—but it’s also seeing increasing innovation and competition. Still, others have survived similar deals. Scale AI’s CEO Jason Droege told Forbes that the business rebounded after Meta executed a $14.3 billion not-quite-acquisition about a year ago, and that the company is on track to hit $1 billion in revenue. In the high-stakes world of AI, it seems anything is possible.