Groq to invest $459m in Australia, launches AI cluster at Equinix’s Sydney data centre
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The news: AI chip manufacturer and software provider Groq is investing USD300 million ($459 million) in Australia and has launched its first 4.5MW AI inference data centre cluster in the Asia-Pacific region at Nasdaq-listed Equinix’s SY5 data centre in Sydney.
The numbers: The company has already invested USD50 million and has plans to bring additional local data centres online to service local demand as well as regional demand from as far as the north of Japan and far west India. The USD300 million investment is forecast to be made over five years.
It has 2.5 million developer accounts registered to Groq cloud, of which about half are in the APAC region with around 30,000 in Australia.
The context: Inference clusters let AI customers run the models they are deploying. Groq claims its language processing unit chips deliver up to 5x faster and cheaper compute than traditional GPUs and hyperscaler clouds.
Having set up the cluster in three weeks, Groq general manager APAC Scott Albin told Capital Brief the company would be quick to jump on any surge in demand.
“We have a unique supply chain. Our chips are made in the United States, we have a very differentiated supply chain that's not bottlenecked. So we can produce chips at a very rapid rate. It can make the racks fast, and we can deploy them quickly,” Albin said.
He also flagged Australia as an ideal launch pad for the APAC region due to its “connectivity, accessibility of talent, ease of doing business” and ease of exporting advanced AI chips given ongoing US Department of Commerce restrictions.
Groq now operates data centres across six countries and its services can now be connected to within 100 milliseconds “of most of the population of the world”.
In mid-September, Groq closed a USD750 million funding round at a post-money valuation of USD6.9 billion to expand its global data centre presence in North America, Europe and the Middle East.
Albin believes the most likely use cases would be for “broad based productivity improvements” supporting employee productivity rather than replacing them, who said that rather than perceiving a bubble “all I see is [AI investment] speeding up”.
In Groq’s experience, infrastructure build up is still lagging demand build. “As soon as we turn it on, it's getting utilised and I think that's a shared experience across the industry,” Albin said.
What they said: Federal assistant minister for the digital economy Andrew Charlton said the “Australian government is welcoming responsible data centre investment”.
“We are continuing to work to attract more because we know this is required for a successful digital economy. Australia is a natural home for this type of world class capability. It is great to see investments that bring high-performance, cost-efficient AI tools to the region.”
The source: Equinix media release
