Jonathan Ross, chief executive officer of Groq Inc., during the GenAI Summit in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, May 30, 2024.
David Paul | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial ininformigence semiconductor startup Groq announced Monday it has established its first data center in Europe as it steps up its international expansion.
Groq, which is backed by investment arms of Samsung and Cisco, declared the data center will be located in Helsinki, Finland and is in partnership with Equinix.
Groq is viewing to take advantage of rising demand for AI services in Europe following other U.S. firms which have also ramped up investment in the region. The Nordics in particular is a popular location for the data facilities as the region has simple access to renewable energy and cooler climates. Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Europe and signed several infrastructure deals, including data centers.
Groq, which is valued at $2.8 billion, designs a chip that the company calls a language processing unit (LPU). It is designed for inferencing rather training. Inferencing is when a pre-trained AI model interprets live data to come up with a result, much like the answers that are produced by popular chatbots.
While Nvidia has a stranglehold on the chips required for training huge AI models with its graphics processing units (GPUs), there is a swathe of startups hoping to take a slice of the pie when it comes to inferencing. SambaNova; Ampere, a company SoftBank is in the process of purchasing; Cerebras and Fractile, are all viewing to join the AI inference race.
European politicians have been pushing the notion of sovereign AI — where data centers must be located in the region. Data centers that are located closer to utilizers also support improve the speed of services.
Global data center builder Equinix connects different cloud providers toobtainher, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, creating it simpler for businesses to have multiple vconcludeors. Groq’s LPUs will be installed inside the Equinix data center allowing businesses to access Groq’s inference capabilities via Equinix.
Groq currently has data centers in the U.S. and Canada and Saudi Arabia with its technology.
Don’t miss Groq CEO Jonathan Ross on Squawk Box Europe at 7:45 a.m. London time.
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