The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 57 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ross: Groq benefits NVIDIA by capturing lower-margin inference workload
“You can almost say we're one of the best things that's ever happened to NVIDIA because they can make every single GPU that they were going to make, and they can sell it for training, high margin, gets amortized across deployment. You know, we'll take the low m…”
Ross opposes 'founder mode', advocating delegation over micromanagement
“I'm anti-founder mode. I believe in delegation. I think when you are telling people how to do their job, that is an indication that it's not a, not necessarily a problem with you. It could just be that that person is not right for that job.”
Ross: Groq plans to serve 50% of global AI inference by 2027
“And our goal by the end of 20, 27 is to be providing at least half of the world's AI inference compute.”
Ross: Specialized AI inference chip startups benefit NVIDIA's stock
“I don't know that Nvidia will ever see it this way, but I do think that those of us focusing on inference and building stuff specifically for that are probably the best thing that's ever happened for Nvidia stock because we'll take on the low margin, high volu…”
Lemkin: Nvidia will likely deprecate Groq's product line post-acquisition
“One, they could do, they could just deprecate the entire product line and do something brand new. They probably will.”
O'Driscoll: Nvidia-Groq Deal Is Marginally Net Positive for Cerebras
“My guess is marginally net positive, but kind of, it's like the real, it's one of those weird things where you ask, is it a positive or negative? The truth is there's a big embedded positive, the comp, and there's a big embedded negative, the musical chair pro…”
O'Driscoll: Groq acquisition won't yield more than two major semiconductor outcomes
“I don't think there's going to be 10 more semis. There might be two.”
Ross: Groq can produce more compute than anyone without supply constraints
“We don't have the same supply chain constraints. We can build more compute than anyone else in the world. The most finite resource right now, compute, the thing that people are bidding up and paying these high margins for, we can produce nearly unlimited quant…”
Ross: Coding will become a required skill for non-technical roles like marketing
“And coding is gonna become the same thing. For you to be in marketing, you're gonna have to be able to code. For you to be in customer service, you're gonna have to be code be able to code.”
Groq deployed a customer feature in four hours with zero human code
“Four hours later, it was in production. Not a single line of code was written by a human being. There was no debugging done by a human being. It was all prompting.”
Ross: Groq will drive cash flow via volume while minimizing margins
“I want my margin to be as low as I possibly can make it while keeping my business stable, and I'm going to make my cash flow by increasing the volume.”
Ross: Groq LPUs Ship in 6 Months Versus 2 Years for GPUs
“You have to write a check two years in advance to get GPUs. For us, you write us a check for a million LPUs, and the first of those LPUs starts showing up six months later.”
Ross: Groq is sole profit-making provider running open-source AI models
“But actually we have a very positive contribution margin right now. And so as far as we know, we're the only ones that are actually making money running these open source models”
Groq maintains policy never to offer highest salary in bidding wars
“We have a policy that we never offer the highest because we want people to choose us, not choose the salary.”
Ross: Groq LPUs Cost 5x Less Than Latest GPUs for Inference
“More than five x lower. Just the memory alone in the latest GPUs costs more than our fully loaded CapEx per chip deployed.”
Ross: Groq will not train proprietary AI models to avoid competing with clients
“We have decided that we're not going to train our own models. We'll do a little fine tuning for specific cases or whatnot, but we don't want to compete.”
Ross: GPU Operational Cost Alone Equals Groq Total CapEx plus OpEx
“So we use about a third of the energy per token. About over a three-year period, one-third of our cost is the OpEx, which is mostly energy and data center rent, and two-thirds is the CapEx, which means that since we're one-third of the energy, the cost to run …”
Lemkin: Jensen Huang closed NVIDIA's $20B Groq deal in two weeks
“He reached out to Jonathan Ross literally just weeks ago, and the deal closed for twenty billion within two weeks. And he told his whole team, I want it done before Christmas, and it was done ahead of time.”
Stebbings: Groq is generating $175 million in revenue
“They're at a hundred and seventy-five million in revenue, so that would be quite an AR multiple to get to where they are.”
Ross: Groq Will Never Create Its Own AI Models
“In our case we found an area where we will not compete with our customers, which is we will not create our own models. So we just won't do it.”
Groq deploys 600 to 3,000 chips per AI model instead of eight
“So rather than using eight chips, we'll use 600 or 3000 for a model.”
Ross: Groq earns ~20% upfront margins on chip deployments
“Anywhere from, depending on the deal we do get some on the back side, but up front it's about 20%.”
Ross: Partners fund Groq's CapEx until target IRR is achieved
“So the deals that we do the partner will off, because we don't deploy, we don't spend money for our own capex. The partner will put up the money for us to deploy. We pay back with a, you know, decent IRR, and, but we split, and most of it goes to the partner, …”
80% of Groq Employees Accepted Equity Swaps During Cash Crunch
“Instead of leaving, about 80% of the employees participated, 50%, I think, went to the statutory minimum salary by law.”
Ross: Groq built its entire hardware and cloud stack with 300 people
“We have 300 people. We built our own chip. We built our own networking hardware and software. We built our own runtime. We built our own orchestration layer. We built our own compiler. We built our own cloud. We built all this with 300 people.”
Ross: Groq will need nearly entire fab capacity next year
“For us to hit our numbers next year, which I'm not sharing publicly, we're going to gonna need almost all of the capacity of the fab that we're using.”
Jonathan Ross: Groq aims to reach over 2 million chips in 2025
“This year we want to be at over two million, and next year the number is much, much, much larger.”
Ross: Groq hardware has no hard drives and stores zero data
“So we store nothing. Like, there is no, like, delete or whatever, like, there is just, we store nothing. We don't even have hard drives, right? Like, we just, we have DRAM, and when the power goes off, everything goes away, right?”
O'Driscoll: Groq generated $4M in 2023 and ~$40M in 2024 revenue
“As I said, four million dollars in 23, forty-ish in 24.”
Stebbings: Nvidia acquired Groq for $20B cash at 3x valuation markup
“Grok being acquired for twenty billion in cash. It happened just before Christmas. Chamath obviously coming out as one of the big winners. Price is three X more than the last round price.”
O'Driscoll: Bankers Will Use Groq's $20B Deal as Cerebras Valuation Comp
“So from the banker process of, you know, you use comps to justify value, now you've got the world's best comp. Right? And believe me, they'll be using it, right?”
Groq engineers recently switched from Anthropic tools to OpenAI Codex
“Our engineers recently started using codecs more than using the Anthropic tools.”
Ross: Groq plans to upgrade its AI chips annually
“We're looking at upgrading chips about once a year.”
Groq raised $750 million at a valuation near $7 billion
“So we raised seven hundred fifty million. ... Yeah, almost seven billion.”
Ross: Groq's latest fundraise was 4x oversubscribed on double target
“I mean, with this fundraise, we ended up raising you know, more than twice what we were, you know, expecting to raise, and then we were forex oversubscribed over over what we did raise, and so we could have raised a lot more money, it would have been more dilu…”
Groq operates with positive gross margins on hardware sales
“So we have when we sell hardware, those hardware units actually have positive margin.”
Ross: PE firms are aggressively seeking cheap AI compute from Groq
“PE firms are all over us. They want access to cheap AI compute, because every time they get more cheap AI compute, they can bring the, they can change the bottom line of their businesses.”
Groq mandates AI tool usage for engineers while leaving tool choice open
“We have a philosophy, we don't tell our engineers what tools to use. We do tell them you must use AI, because otherwise you're just not going to be competitive.”
Ross: A customer recently requested 5x Groq's total chip capacity
“Like I said, last week someone came to us and asked for five times our total capacity.”
Ross: Groq has reached 2.2 million registered developers
“I mean, we have 2.2 million developers on us now. That's how many have signed up.”
Morin: Groq and Cerebras beat GPUs via on-chip data storage
“Actually, that's why Grok achieves, ah, not Grok, but Grok, Cerebras, and all these folks, they achieve very high performance single stream is because the data is right in the chip that doesn't have to get it from memory, which is slow, which GPU has to do.”
Groq Completed Saudi AI Deployment in 51 Days
“Ah, the recent deployment we did in, in Saudi Arabia 51 days from contract to the first tokens being served in production in country.”
Groq Chips Function as Switches Without External Hardware
“We actually don't use switches to communicate between our chips. We just plug our chips into our chips. Our chips are the switch.”
Ross: The AI industry mistakenly believed training was costlier than inference
“When we started, the first misconception, which people don't hold anymore, is that training was more expensive than inference.”
Ross: Groq's chip architecture improves energy efficiency 3x per token
“It improves at about three X, and the reason is...”
Jonathan Ross: Groq scaled from 640 to over 40,000 chips in 2024
“We started 2024 with about 640 chips in production. We ended with over 40,000.”