How Groq Makes Money

Groq makes money by selling AI inference. Most customers pay per million tokens to run open-weight models (such as Llama, Qwen, Kimi and Whisper) through GroqCloud, an OpenAI-compatible API with a free tier and paid developer and enterprise plans. Larger customers buy dedicated capacity or on-premises GroqRack clusters. In December 2025 Groq also received a one-time licensing payment from Nvidia, reported at about $20 billion, much of which was reported to flow to investors and departing staff. Since that deal Groq describes itself as a neocloud and has become an Nvidia Cloud Partner, so its data centers can host Nvidia hardware as well as LPUs. Groq does not publish revenue.

Since the Nvidia deal, Groq's strategy is to grow GroqCloud as a neocloud: add data center capacity across regions, sell dedicated and sovereign capacity to large customers, and run a mix of its own LPUs and Nvidia systems. It rebuilt its leadership in 2026 with COO Alan Rice (ex-xAI and Meta), CTO Sinclair Schuller and CPO Rakesh Malhotra (both co-founders of Nuvalence), and funded the expansion with a $650 million raise in June 2026.