Aug 5 (Reuters) - Semiconductor startup Groq said on

Monday it has raised $640 million in a Series D funding round

led by Cisco Investments, Samsung Catalyst Fund and BlackRock

Private Equity Partners, among others, bringing its valuation to

$2.8 billion.

The Silicon Valley firm, founded by a former Alphabet

engineer, specializes in producing AI inference chips - a type

of semiconductor that optimizes speed and executes commands of

pre-trained models.

Besides big firms such as Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ),

many startups including Groq have been trying to nibble away at

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) dominant position in the booming AI chip industry.

Last year, Groq adapted Meta Platforms' ( META ) large

language model, LLaMA, to be able to run on its own chips rather

than those of Nvidia's ( NVDA ). Meta researchers built LLaMA

using Nvidia's ( NVDA ) chips.

Cloud service providers racing to develop their own AI

products are also seeking alternatives to Nvidia's ( NVDA )

top-of-the-line processors due to high demand but limited

supply.

In 2021, Groq was valued at $1.1 billion after a funding

from Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital.

"Groq will use the funding to scale the capacity of its

tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and

features to the GroqCloud," the company said about the latest

round of funds.

Groq will deploy more than 108,000 Language Processing Units

manufactured by Global Foundries by the end of the first

quarter of 2025.

Groq has also announced the appointment of Stuart Pann, a

former senior executive at Intel and HP Inc, as its chief

operating officer, while Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun

was named its newest technical adviser.