Artificial intelligence chip start-up Groq is on track to raise $600 million (£451.6m) in new funding, valuing it at roughly $6bn, Bloomberg reported, in the latest indication of continued investor enthusiasm around AI.

Dallas-based venture capital firm Disruptive is reportedly leading the round with an investment of more than $300m, but the fundraising is still being finalised and details could change.

The Information reported on Tuesday that Groq had cut more than $1bn from its revenue projections for this year.

AI chips

Bloomberg’s report cited unnamed people as saying some of those revenues could be realised next year instead.

The round is reportedly larger than Groq had initially planned, and brings the total raised by Groq to more than $2bn, while doubling its valuation.

The company, which aims to take on Nvidia in the field of AI accelerator chips running in data centres, raised $640m at a $2.8bn valuation in August 2024, in a round led by BlackRock.

Groq was founded by Jonathan Ross, who previously helped develop Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chip that the company uses largely for internal AI workloads.

The company designs a chip called a language processing unit (LPU) intended for inferencing, or delivering AI services, rather than training, a field dominated by Nvidia.

Data centre expansion

Groq is building its chips into data centres around the world, giving access to processing power for AI inferencing workloads depending on where they are needed.

It currently has infrastructure in the US, Canada and Saudi Arabia, and earlier this month said it had established its first data centre in Europe in Helsinki, Finland, through a partnership with global data centre builder Equinix.

Strong demand for AI chips has driven Nvidia’s market capitalisation higher than $4tn.