Groq, founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, one of the original architects behind Google's Tensor Processing Unit, designs its own LPU (Language Processing Unit) chips built from the ground up for running inference on large language models rather than adapting general-purpose GPUs.
That custom silicon shows up directly in benchmarks: GroqCloud has posted some of the fastest publicly measured token-generation speeds for open models, which has made it a default choice for developers building voice agents and other latency-sensitive applications where response time is the product.
GroqCloud includes a free developer tier alongside usage-based pricing per million tokens for production traffic. For a developer building an application where inference latency directly affects user experience, such as real-time voice or chat, Groq's purpose-built inference hardware addresses that directly.
