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AI chip manufacturer to set up in Saudi Arabia

10 September 2024

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Silicon Valley-based Groq, a company that develops language processing units (LPU), plans to establish a computing infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, its chief executive and founder Jonathan Ross told the ongoing Global AI Summit in Riyadh.

Ross said the company has completed the first step of building domestic capacity by establishing an office in Riyadh.

"We will develop compute capacity here," Ross, who heads the firm that aims to rival leading artificial intelligence (AI) chip manufacturer Nvidia, told the summit.

Ross did not specify the scope, capacity or timeline for manufacturing its proprietary LPU chips locally.

Groq has designed LPUs specifically to handle the unique speed and memory demands of large-language models, a type of AI programme that can recognise and generate text.

Not to be confused with Grok, a generative language developed by Elon Musk-headed xAI, Groq's LPU has recently hit a record speed of 534 tokens a second, according to Ross – a token being the unit of data that is processed by algorithms.

The executive said the company has over 444,000 developers on their LPUs, making them the "largest semiconductor company next to Nvidia", which is understood to have over 2 billion developers.

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Jennifer Aguinaldo

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