Groq raises US$1.5 billion as Saudi Arabia invests in AI
Chip developer Groq Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has raised US$1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia to expand the kingdom’s AI infrastructure.
The company has also announced the worldwide availability of its GroqCloud AI inference service. Groq has develop Language Processing Unit (LPU) Inference Engine chips.
The funding announcement follows on from Groq building the middle-east region’s largest inference cluster at Dammam, Saudi Arabia in December 2024 and bringing it online in eight days. The cluster includes 19,000 LPUs. It comes after the company raised US$640 million at a valuation of about US$2.8 billion in August 2024.
The money will be provided to Groq during the course of 2025 and used to expand the data center at Dammam, according to Reuters.
The LPU sits in the data centre alongside CPUs and graphics processors, such as those provided by Nvidia, that enable training. Customers can choose on-premise deployment or API access. Groq has run the Llama-2 70B large language model (LLM) at over 300 tokens per second per user.
Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq, announced the Saudi Arabian investment at the LEAP 2025 event held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At the LEAP event the Saudi government announced US$14.9 billion of AI investment.
It is to be expected that the US$1.5 billion will be used to ramp production of the LPUs but could also be used to iterate the design to a more advance manufacturing process node as well as to work on a more diverse range of AI processors.
Groq’s chips are subject to US export controls. Groq said it has obtained the necessary licenses, according to Reuters.
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