Groq marked down 49% to $3.5B the same day Higgsfield was marked up fourfold

Groq announced a $350 million Series A on August 17, 2026 at a $3.5 billion valuation, led by Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia ^[1]. In September 2025 the same firm led a $750 million round that valued Groq at $6.9 billion ^[2]. The gap is a 49% markdown in roughly eleven months ^[3][4].

What moved was not demand. Between those two marks, Nvidia entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Groq's inference technology, and founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra and other team members joined Nvidia ^[5]. Bloomberg characterised the new price as roughly half the prior valuation, struck after Nvidia licensed the technology and hired away much of the talent ^[6]. Groq remains independent under new chief executive Simon Edwards ^[7], and it had already reset its valuation in an undisclosed $650 million June 2026 round ^[8]. So $3.5 billion is the first disclosed price for the company that is left.

That company is a different asset. The old Groq built LPUs rather than GPUs as an Nvidia alternative ^[9]. The new one is an Nvidia Cloud Partner certified to deploy Nvidia accelerated computing ^[10], running 13 data centres and planning to go from 54 megawatts to more than 200 in 2027 ^[11]. Its developer base roughly tripled over the same period the mark halved, from more than 2 million to more than 6 million ^[12].

The dispersion is the point. On the same day, Higgsfield announced a $400 million Series B at $5.4 billion, more than four times its $1.3 billion January mark ^[13][14], on annualised revenue of $700 million and users that doubled since January to over 30 million ^[15]. One AI mark fell by half and another quadrupled inside six months, with no common direction.

Whether the licensing-and-hire structure Nvidia used, which Bloomberg notes Meta and Google have also employed ^[16], keeps producing marks like this is the thing to price.