MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.—Groq CEO Jonathan Ross is adamant his company no longer sells hardware—the data center AI chip startup is now an AI cloud services provider.
“Long term, we always wanted to go there, but the realization was, you cannot sell chips as a startup, it’s just too hard,” Ross told EE Times in a recent in-person interview. “The reason is the minimum quantity of purchase for it to make sense is high, the expense is high, and no-one wants to take the risk of buying a whole bunch of hardware—it doesn’t matter how amazing it is.”
Jonathan Ross (Source: Groq)
Groq’s customer is now the AI developer. Following a number of viral social media posts showcasing the latency of its rack-scale AI inference systems, the company currently has 70,000 developers registered for its real-time large language model (LLM) inference cloud service, GroqCloud, with 19,000 new applications running.
“You get the sort of developer traction we’ve gotten, and people want to buy hardware, but we are no longer selling hardware, because why would we at this point?” Ross said. “It’s not a pivot—we always intended to have a cloud service, we just expected we would do both.”
“Long term, we always wanted to go there, but the realization was, you cannot sell chips as a startup, it’s just too hard,” Ross told EE Times in a recent in-person interview. “The reason is the minimum quantity of purchase for it to make sense is high, the expense is high, and no-one wants to take the risk of buying a whole bunch of hardware—it doesn’t matter how amazing it is.”
Jonathan Ross (Source: Groq)
Groq’s customer is now the AI developer. Following a number of viral social media posts showcasing the latency of its rack-scale AI inference systems, the company currently has 70,000 developers registered for its real-time large language model (LLM) inference cloud service, GroqCloud, with 19,000 new applications running.
“You get the sort of developer traction we’ve gotten, and people want to buy hardware, but we are no longer selling hardware, because why would we at this point?” Ross said. “It’s not a pivot—we always intended to have a cloud service, we just expected we would do both.”