FILE PHOTO: The logo of Saudi Aramco is pictured outside Khurais, Saudi Arabia October 12, 2019. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
Riyadh: Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Groq Inc has partnered with oil producer Aramco to build a giant data centre in Saudi Arabia that it hopes will become a hub for companies running AI systems across the Middle East, Africa and India.
The California-based startup will operate what it has said will be the world’s largest AI inferencing centre that initially has 19,000 language processing units (LPUs), while Aramco will fund the development that is expected to cost “in the order of nine figures”, Groq chief executive officer Jonathan Ross said in an interview in Riyadh. The data centre will be up and running by the end of this year, and could later expand to include a total of 200,000 language processing units, Ross said
Groq has partnered with Aramco Digital, a new unit of the world’s largest oil producer intended to help Aramco harness AI to help its core energy business while also facilitating other firms to use AI.
Aramco is “planning to do massive capital deployments for this, and it is a way to help diversify the economy away from oil,” Ross said.
By building the data centre in Saudi Arabia, Groq aims to capitalise on the country’s low energy costs, availability of land, and access to four billion people within a 100 millisecond ping – a measure of how quickly data can travel between processing location and users.
Saudi Arabia wants to become a hub for technology industries like AI as it seeks ways to modernise its economy and boost other sources of income besides oil.
Yet some of its growth plans have been hampered by US government restrictions on exports of the latest AI chips, which has limited the availability of the latest chips developed by Nvidia Corp.
Groq said it does not expect to face any US government restrictions on its plans to boost its presence in Saudi Arabia, including establishing a regional headquarters in Riyadh.
“We’ve been very open with US Commerce Department about our intent to deploy here,” Ross said.
Groq could look at working with the Saudi oil producer on other projects in the future, Ross said.
“The expectation is that we’re going to partner with Aramco Digitial for quite a bit of our deployment in this region and anywhere we can,” he said.
“They’ve been a great partner so we would work with them anywhere we could.”
The inferencing data centre will use Groq’s LPU AI inference technology, advanced AI processors designed specifically for massive-scale inference workloads that deliver speed and efficiency.
In the past six months alone, nearly half a million AI developers have adopted Groq inference cloud solutions.
The partnership in Saudi Arabia is expected to set the new compute standard for AI inference data centres around the world, and marks progress towards the Groq mission to develop AI inference compute centers around the globe.
The partnership aims to revolutionise data processing and analytics across various sectors.
The facility will process billions of tokens per day by the end of 2024 and be able to onboard hundreds of thousands of developers in the region and then hundreds of billions of tokens per day with millions of developers by 2025.
Tareq Amin, chief excutive of Aramco Digital, said, “With the support of the kingdom’s leadership, we are proud to partner with Groq to develop a world-leading inferencing data center in Saudi Arabia.
“This initiative not only aims to create the largest facility of its kind but also ensures seamless access to advanced AI computing power.” — Bloomberg
