It is not everyday that a Fabrica Ventures portco closes a $1.5B

The AI chip developer Groq announced this week that it has secured a $1.5B commitment from Saudi Arabia to accelerate its AI chip delivery.

This deal comes roughly six months after Groq raised $640M from Samsung Electronics, Cisco, BlackRock, and other backers (including Fabrica Ventures), bringing the company’s valuation to $2.8B.

Last September, Groq unveiled plans to establish an AI data center in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, in collaboration with Aramco Digital, the technology arm of Aramco. The facility went live in December—remarkably, Groq brought the facility online in just eight days. It operates using Groq’s flagship LPU (Language Processing Unit) chips

Groq’s chips are housed in a system called GroqRack, which consists of eight servers, each equipped with eight LPUs. These processors are interconnected through Groq’s internally developed RealScale technology, eliminating the need for external switches. A single GroqRack delivers 12 petaflops of performance when handling FP16 data points, a standard format for AI models.

Groq offers its chips through GroqCloud, a managed cloud platform with an on-demand tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) model, allowing users to pay based on token usage.

Conclusion

I can hear the champagne popping from home.