Groq

Groq, Inc. is an American AI hardware and infrastructure company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross — an engineer who previously co-created Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU); Ross is also the company's CEO. Groq designed a custom LPU (Language Processing Unit) — an ASIC-class accelerator optimized for language-model inference, offering very low latency and high, deterministic token-generation throughput. Built on the LPU, the company runs the GroqCloud cloud platform (launched February 2024) and GroqRack systems for on-premise deployments. Groq positions itself as a fast AI inference provider: according to the company, more than 5 million developers and thousands of companies use its infrastructure, processing trillions of tokens per week. The company raised a seed round (2017, $10M, Social Capital), a Series C (2021, $300M) and a Series D (August 2024, $640M, led by BlackRock) at a valuation of about $2.8B; in 2025 a financial commitment from Saudi Arabia (about $1.5B) for infrastructure expansion was announced.