The American AI hardware scale-up Groq has acquired Maxeler Technologies and, by extension, Maxeler IoT-Labs in Delft. This satellite office at Yes!Delft was set up in 2018 (link in Dutch) to support the British dataflow systems pioneer’s expansion from banks, oil companies and other big businesses to smaller-scale applications – processing IoT sensor data being a typical example. The location was also chosen to benefit from knowledge sharing with Delft University of Technology.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, with teams across the US, Canada and the UK, Groq is a data center accelerator maker focused on delivering real-time AI and high-performance computing (HPC). Initial customers span finance, self-driving cars, industrial automation, cybersecurity and scientific research for government labs. The scale-up has raised 367 million dollars to date.
Maxeler was founded in 2003 as a spinoff of Imperial College London. The company evolved into the leading expert in dataflow computing. It focuses on applications for converged HPC solutions in domains such as financial services as well as climate, brain and quantum computer simulations.
Together, the companies aim to advance the next era of compute for AI, machine learning and HPC solutions. With Maxeler’s decades of experience serving customers across Europe, Groq now expands into that region. “Their joining adds depth and breadth to deliver on the increasing demands for converged HPC and ML solutions and further accelerate several of our key foci: developer velocity, scalability and driving the cost of compute toward zero,” comments Groq CEO and founder Jonathan Ross.
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