Jonathan Ross, Managing Director of Groq Inc., at the Genai summit in San Francisco, California, United States, Thursday, May 30, 2024.
David Paul | Bloomberg | Getty images
The semiconductor startup of artificial intelligence Groq announced on Monday that it had established its first data center in Europe when it intensifies its international expansion.
Groq, which is supported by investment weapons from Samsung and Ciscosaid the data center will be located in Helsinki, Finland and in partnership with Equinix.
Groq seeks to take advantage of the growing demand for AI services in Europe following other American companies that have also increased investments in the region. Nordic in particular is a popular location for data installations, because the region has easy access to renewable energies and cooler climates. Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Europe and signed several infrastructure agreements, including data centers.
Groq, which is evaluated at 2.8 billion dollars, designs a chip that the company calls a linguistic processing unit (LPU). It is designed for inference rather than training. Inference is when a pre-formed AI model interprets live data to find a result, a bit like the responses produced by popular chatbots.
Although Nvidia has a workforce on the chips necessary to form huge AI models with its graphic treatment units (GPU), there is a band of startups hoping to take a slice of pie when it comes to inference. Sambanova; Ampère, a softbank company is buying; Cerebras and fractiles all seek to join the AI inference race.
European politicians have pushed the concept of sovereign AI – where data centers must be located in the region. Data centers located closer to users also help improve the speed of services.
Global Data Center Builder Equinix connects various cloud suppliers, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which allows companies to have several suppliers. The LPUs of Groq will be installed inside the Equinix data center allowing companies to access GROQ’s inference capacities via Equinix.
Groq currently has data centers in the United States and Canada and Saudi Arabia with its technology.
Do not miss the CEO of Groq Jonathan Ross on Squawk Box Europe at 7:45 a.m. London time.
