Groq, headquartered in Mountain View, California, is a semiconductor and AI systems company known for building ultra-fast processors optimized for inference. Founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, a former Google engineer who worked on the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Groq set out to design chips that deliver deterministic, high-throughput performance for machine learning applications.
At the core of Groq’s approach is its Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP) architecture, which emphasizes simplicity and efficiency. Unlike traditional GPUs, Groq’s chips are designed to maximize speed and predictability, allowing them to process large language models and other inference workloads with extremely low latency. This makes Groq particularly well-suited for real-time applications such as conversational AI, search, and financial services where response times are critical.
Groq delivers its technology through the GroqCloud platform, which offers developers on-demand access to its hardware for inference at scale. By abstracting away the complexity of hardware management, Groq enables organizations to tap into its speed advantages without needing to own specialized infrastructure.
The company has positioned itself as a complement to Nvidia’s GPU dominance: while Nvidia leads in training frontier-scale models, Groq emphasizes inference acceleration—the step where trained models are deployed and need to respond quickly to user queries. This specialization has attracted partnerships across government, enterprise, and financial services sectors.
By 2025, Groq had carved out a reputation as one of the most innovative challengers in AI hardware. With Jonathan Ross as CEO, the company continues to advance its vision of delivering ultra-fast, deterministic AI systems, positioning itself as the go-to platform for inference in the age of generative AI.
