AI chip company Groq has secured a $1.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia to expand AI inference infrastructure in the country.
The chip company has an existing partnership with Aramco Digital in the region, under which Groq will provide the necessary scalable infrastructure to bring the voice-commanded generative AI model Norous to market.
Aramco Digital is the digital and technology subsidiary of state-owned Aramco, the world’s largest producer of oil which has rights to the second-largest proven crude oil reserves globally.
The new investment will be used to support the expansion of Groq’s existing data center in Damman, which will support the development of the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority’s (SDAIA) Arabic Large Language Model, ALLaM.
Writing on LinkedIn, Groq CEO and co-founder Jonathan Ross said: “We built the region's largest inference cluster in Saudi Arabia in 51 days and we just announced a $1.5bn agreement for Groq to expand our advanced LPU-based AI inference infrastructure. Build fast.”
Speaking to DCD at Supercomputing 2024 in November, Mark Heaps, chief tech evangelist & VP of brand and creative at Groq, said Aramco Digital and Saudi Arabia were able to fund the data center project because the region has access to unlimited affordable electricity.
“We’re sending thousands upon thousands of LPUs (language processing units) into the region,” Heaps said. “[The Damman data center] is part of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 vision… and it’s all dedicated to inference, no training whatsoever.”
He added: “Geopolitically, [it’s important] to be in that region and bring economy to the region because I think many people [in Saudi Arabia] see that fossil fuels aren’t going to be the way forward exclusively for them, they have to have other economies. And compute is a great economy to start getting into.”
The latest funding agreement was announced at LEAP 2025, Saudi Arabia’s global technology event.
Groq was co-founded in 2016 by Ross, who previously helped lead Google's Tensor Processing Unit development. The company provides dedicated chips and accelerators within its own servers and racks designed for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing.
In August 2024, Groq closed a $640m funding round that was led by BlackRock and saw participation from Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
