Groq

Groq is a semiconductor company that designs Language Processing Units (LPUs) — custom chips purpose-built for AI inference at unprecedented speed. While NVIDIA dominates AI training with its GPUs, Groq has carved out a distinct position in the inference economy, where the speed and cost of running trained models determines the viability of real-time agentic AI applications.

The Inference Economy

Jon Radoff's analysis of compute capital markets identifies inference as the growing frontier of AI economics. As models are trained once but run billions of times, the cost structure of AI shifts from training compute to inference compute. Groq's LPU architecture attacks this directly — its deterministic, low-latency design can generate tokens at speeds that make GPU-based inference look sluggish, routinely delivering hundreds of tokens per second for large language models.

Enabling Real-Time Agents

The speed advantage matters enormously for agentic web applications. When an AI agent needs to make multiple LLM calls within a single user interaction — reasoning, tool-calling, and responding — every millisecond of latency compounds. Groq's sub-second response times for complex queries enable the kind of fluid, real-time agent interactions that feel conversational rather than computational. In 2026, Groq partnered with NVIDIA to integrate its inference technology alongside NVIDIA's training infrastructure, signaling a maturing ecosystem where specialized hardware serves each phase of the AI pipeline.

Hardware Composability

Groq's approach embodies composability at the hardware level — the idea that different specialized components can be assembled for different workloads. Rather than using general-purpose GPUs for everything, the emerging AI infrastructure stack uses training chips, inference chips, and edge devices in composition. This mirrors the software composability that defines the Creator Era, applied to the silicon layer.