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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

> If customers come with requests for high volumes of chips for very large installations, Groq will instead propose partnering on data center deployment. Ross said that Groq has “signed a deal” with Saudi state-owned oil company Aramco, though he declined to give further details, saying only that the deal involved “a very large deployment of [Groq] LPUs.”

What? How does this make sense?

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If you read on, Groq said they would only sell hardware to US companies and outside companies would get cloud services, not the LPUs. I think the US government told them to keep the LPUs in-house since they could be the secret sauce for scale.

I'm not questioning the deployment strategy, I'm wondering why Saudi Aramco wants to access so much compute power that is highly specialized(?) for generative AI workloads. Or is it more general than that?

It’s about material discovery[0], Aramco built a 250b model to help them improve efficiency [1].

[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materi...

[1] https://www.aramco.com/en/news-media/speeches/2024/leap24--r...

What's the connection there? The second link says it's not about materials discovery at all but rather their GigaPOWERS model, which is a physics simulation used to optimize CO2 injection into their fields (i.e. optimizing recovery). POWERS is old, it was in development for decades already. Given that they don't plan to use Groq for LLMs but simply for its parallel computation abilities. I wonder to what extent this deal - if it goes through - will seriously drain Groq, actually, as POWERS would not be like the code Groq was designed to run and so much of their performance comes from the way they tightly optimize for very specific calculations.

Hi there, I work for Groq.

Groq's system was designed to run arbitrary high performance numerical workloads. In the past it has been used for a variety of scientific computation tasks, including nuclear fusion and drug discovery.

https://www.alcf.anl.gov/news/argonne-deploys-new-groq-syste...

It's an assumption from my side, that they will utilize GenAI in material discovery for Aramco or SABIC[0]. Even if Groq won't fit that use-case a couple of billions with another hardware vendor is nothing if this paid off.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABIC

> I'm wondering why Saudi Aramco wants to access so much compute power that is highly specialized(?) for generative AI workloads. Or is it more general than that?

For vanity reasons and because AI is the future (not every company acts that rationally for huge buying decisions).

Also diversification. They’re smart people; oil isn’t the future. Comparatively small investments to hedge make perfect sense.

Maybe Saudi doesn’t want to rely on OpenAI and other APIs and wants to run a fine-tuned Mixtral model on the cloud or their hardware. International companies will probably opt for an open source model since the data is sensitive and OpenAI could pass that to intelligence.

Partly supply-chain security I imagine. If generative AI does indeed become the next big thing much nicer to have a giant pile of hardware physically in your country than buying a drip feed from a foreign company.

Oil & gas has large data needs, they had petabyte-scale data 2 decades ago.

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