Pitching Aramco Digital + Groq’s inference data center partnership: California-based chip and AI player Groq is looking to “partner with Aramco Digital for quite a bit of our deployment in this region and anywhere we can,” Groq CEO Jonathan Ross tells Bloomberg. Groq and Aramco Digital — Aramco’s tech arm — signed an agreement last week to build the world’s largest inference data center in the world. The data center is expected to cost “in the order of nine figures,” Ross says, with plans for the center to be up and running before the close of the year.
Part of Saudi’s diversification plans: The state-owned oil giant is “planning to do massive capital deployments for this, and it is a way to help diversify the economy away from oil,” Ross added. Meanwhile, Groq is looking to double down on the Kingdom’s low energy costs, available land plots, “and access to 4 bn people within a 100 millisecond ping — a measure of how quickly data can travel between processing location and users,” the business news information service explained.
Meanwhile, the Guardian is out with a piece on the Kingdom’s call for action to block Iranian weapon shipments to the Houthis as tensions grow over the Iranian-backed militia’s missile capabilities.