Groq vs. GPUs: The future of AI inference in 2026
Back in 2016, Jonathan Ross founded Groq, the AI chip startup, which went on to enter a non-exclusive licensing agreement with NVIDIA for Groq’s inference technology (as part of a $20 billion deal). The name ‘Groq’ is commonly confused with X (formerly Twitter)’s Grok, which was launched in 2023 as a Gen AI chatbot. As demand for real-time AI continues to grow, inference has become one of the most important and expensive parts of the machine learning lifecycle.