Groq
Platinum Sponsor
About Groq
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Groq is a pioneering AI hardware and cloud services company revolutionizing the inference landscape. Founded by former Google TPU engineer Jonathan Ross, Groq has rapidly emerged as a formidable challenger in the AI acceleration market. The company focuses on delivering unprecedented speed for AI inference, making large language models and other AI applications accessible with real-time performance. With its recent $640 million funding round led by BlackRock, resulting in a $2.8 billion valuation, Groq is positioned at the forefront of AI infrastructure innovation.
Who They Are
Led by founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, Groq represents a new generation of AI infrastructure companies focused on solving the critical bottleneck of inference speed. The company's approach challenges traditional GPU architectures with its purpose-built Language Processing Unit (LPU) chips, specifically designed for sequential processing tasks like language generation. With strategic backing from prominent investors and technical advisors like Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who noted that "The Groq chip really goes for the jugular," Groq has positioned itself as a disruptive force in the AI chip market dominated by NVIDIA.
What They Do
Groq delivers ultra-fast AI inference through its innovative hardware and cloud platform:
GroqCloud™ - A cloud platform providing access to Groq's high-performance inference capabilities for today's most popular open-source AI models, including:
- Meta's Llama family (including Llama 4)
- Mistral AI's Mixtral models
- Google's Gemma models
- OpenAI's Whisper (for audio transcription)
- Qwen models and more
Developer Tools - Seamless integration with existing AI workflows:
- OpenAI-compatible API endpoints
- Simple three-line code changes to switch from other providers
- Self-serve developer tier for experimentation
Groq LPU - The company's proprietary Language Processing Unit hardware architecture engineered specifically for AI inference workloads, delivering exceptional performance compared to traditional GPU solutions.
PlayAI Dialog - Groq's first text-to-speech model designed to make voice AI sound more human-like and natural.
Capabilities
Dramatically faster processing of AI models through optimized hardware and software, reducing response times from seconds to milliseconds.
High-performance, scalable infrastructure for deploying and serving large language models and other AI workloads with minimal latency.
Fast and accurate speech-to-text transcription using models like Whisper, plus text-to-speech capabilities through dialog.
Offers compatibility layers, APIs, and SDKs that simplify integration with existing AI workflows and minimize migration effort.
Delivers instant access to optimized AI inference through a cloud service with simple API access and competitive pricing models.