Is this the deal that launched a million blog posts? It certainly feels like a million and, initially, I didn’t want to make it a million and one, but … this Substack is passionately interested in computer architecture and, for reasons that I’ll explain later, this feels like a significant moment in the history of computer architecture. Plus, now that things have settled down a little after the initial wave of excitement and puzzlement about the deal - see the quote from Irrational Analysis below - so it might be a good point to take stock and to share a distinctive perspective on the deal. We’ll start with some Questions and Answers on Groq and the ‘deal’ between Groq and Nvidia. What is Groq?

  • Startup founded in 2016 by members of Google’s original TPU team including CEO Jonathan Ross;
  • Total publicly reported funding of more than 1.4bnincludingmostrecently1.4bn including most recently 750m at a 6.9bnvaluationinSeptember2025(notethatsomereportsputtotalfundingat6.9bn valuation in September 2025 (note that some reports put total funding at 3.3bn);
  • Groq created chips that it calls Language Processing Units (LPUs - originally Tensor Streaming Processors or TSPs);
  • LPUs are designed for AI inference only;
  • From 2024 Groq stopped selling its chips to third parties; instead it focused on:
    • partnering with others - notably in Saudi Arabia - to create datacenter scale deployments;
    • offering inference as a service to developers via what it calls GroqCloud; For more on the LPU Groq has provides a good overview.