Groq commits up to $300m in Australia expansion

US chip startup Groq, which designs processors for artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing, is expanding its infrastructure in Australia with a new deployment in Equinix’s datacentre in Sydney. The new location will provide low-latency services for customers in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region.

The company said the 4.5MW facility will provide faster and lower-cost inferencing than traditional graphics processing units (GPUs) and hyperscaler clouds. It will utilise the Equinix Fabric interconnection service for secure, low-latency, high-speed connectivity.

Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq, said the investment addresses a global shortage of compute capacity. “The world doesn’t have enough compute for everyone to build AI. That’s why Groq and Equinix are expanding access, starting in Australia,” Ross said.

Groq has already invested $50m in the project and expects that figure to increase to $300m, with potential for further expansion. “We’ll go as fast as we can,” Ross said, adding that this may include additional datacentre locations in other parts of the country.

He drew a sharp contrast between Groq’s technology and existing AI hardware, noting that GPUs – while important for the industry’s start – are akin to dial-up internet connectivity while Groq’s offering is the equivalent of broadband.

Groq’s language processing unit (LPU) chips were designed specifically for high-speed inferencing. According to Ross, they are faster and more energy efficient than standard GPUs. “Our architecture allows us to run fast without taking a lot of energy,” he said. “That’s part of the advantage.”

The generation of a single token may involve as many as 50 equipment racks, with each rack containing 72 LPUs. Groq’s design avoids the need for external memory, contributing significantly to both performance and efficiency.

Ian Andrews, Groq’s chief revenue officer, noted that Australia and the Asia-Pacific region are key markets for the company, because around half of the over two million developers that use Groq are located in the region – including some 30,000 in Australia – and this is where they want to perform AI inferencing.

One of the leading applications for Groq is producing code, and it is already being used for that purpose by well-known Australian companies such as Canva and Atlassian.

Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and chief operating officer of Canva, said: “We’re entering a new era where technology has the potential to massively accelerate human creativity. With Australia’s growing strength in AI and compute infrastructure, we’re looking forward to continuing to empower more than 260 million people to bring their ideas to life in entirely new ways.”

Victor Bajanov, executive of AI transformation at Quantium, Australia’s first and largest data science and AI company, explained that while response time is critical for interactive applications and voice interfaces, the most important benefit of speed is the ability to obtain high quality results.

By performing more iterations in a given time, developers can use feedback to rapidly improve a model’s answer. This increased speed “completely changes the spectrum of what you can actually do,” Bajanov explained.

A major concern for Quantium’s customers is data sovereignty. Bajanov described the Groq announcement as “very exciting,” because being able to perform all computing onshore “immediately ends the conversation” regarding data governance risk.

Groq chose to work with Equinix because it is one of the best datacentre providers, Ross said, citing the example of Groq’s Finland location which was up and running just 34 days after approaching Equinix. “I think Elon takes a lot longer than that to get his datacentres up and running,” he quipped, referring to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Andrew Charlton, federal assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy, said: “We think that this type of investment from companies like Groq and Equinix confirm that Australia is a good place for the digital economy, a good place for investments like this, and a country that can attract the world's best technology.”

He observed that Australia already ranks second only behind the US in terms of datacentre investment, thanks to factors including abundant land, access to renewable energy, a highly skilled workforce, comparatively low construction costs, and stable regulatory and policy settings.

“Every new datacentre deployment creates skills, jobs, and competitive advantage for our nation,” Charlton added. “It strengthens Australia’s role in the global AI economy, and it gives us a sovereign edge on a world where every nation is asking how they can ensure secure access to compute.”