Chip Startup Groq Reached a Deal with Oil Giant Aramco
Artificial intelligence startup Groq Inc. has partnered with oil producer Aramco to build a giant data center in Saudi Arabia that it hopes will become a hub for companies running AI systems across the Middle East, Africa and India.
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@GroqInc has penned a partnership with Aramco#ai #startup #oil #SaudiArabia https://t.co/qXnn0eSlTQ
— The_Journalbiz (@the_journalbiz) September 16, 2024
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The AI startup will operate what it has said will be the world’s largest AI inferencing center that initially has 19,000 language processing units, while Aramco will fund the development that is expected to cost “in the order of nine figures,” Groq Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross said in an interview in Riyadh. The data center will be up and running by the end of this year, and could later expand to include a total of 200,000 language processing units, Ross said
Groq has partnered with Aramco Digital, a new unit of the world’s largest oil producer intended to help Aramco harness AI to help its core energy business while also facilitating other firms to use AI.
Aramco is “planning to do massive capital deployments for this, and it is a way to help diversify the economy away from oil,” Ross said. By building the data center in Saudi Arabia, Groq aims to capitalize on the country’s low energy costs, availability of land, and access to 4 billion people within a 100 millisecond ping – a measure of how quickly data can travel between processing location and users.
