Groq joins with Aramco to build data center and AI regional hub
By building Saudi Arabia, Groq aims to capitalize on low energy costs, availability of land, and access to 4 billion people in the broader region
Saudi Aramco President and CEO Amin Nasser speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas, on March 18, 2024. (Photo: Getty Images)
Groq Inc., a California-based artificial intelligence startup, is teaming up with Aramco to build a data center in Saudi Arabia that it hopes will become a regional AI hub.
With funding from Aramco, the No. 1 oil company, Groq plans to operate the world’s largest AI inferencing center with an initial cluster of 19,000 language processing units that is expected to cost “in the order of nine figures,” CEO Jonathan Ross told Bloomberg in an interview. It may grow to as much as 200,000 processing units.
The partnership will be managed through Aramco Digital, a new unit intended to help Aramco use AI in its core energy business while also helping other firms use the technology.
Aramco is “planning to do massive capital deployments for this, and it is a way to help diversify the economy away from oil,” Ross told the news agency.
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, Ross said.