AI startup Groq is aiming to establish more than twelve data centers next year, according to CEO Jonathan Ross.

The company has already set up 12 data centers this year so far, and wants to top that figure, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

During an interview, Ross said that people should “expect that [number] to grow rapidly.”

Thus far, Groq has a presence in the US, Canada, the Middle East, and Europe, with plans to establish data centers in Asia. According to Ross, the company has seen a lot of success in Asia – particularly India – which he puts down to Groq’s ability to produce and deploy chips faster, and their lower power usage than GPUs.

Speaking on the company’s demand, Ross said: “Every time we overcompensate by trying to build more, people surprise us by needing even more than we built.”

Groq is a known customer of Equinix data centers, having leased capacity at a facility in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this year. Elsewhere, the company has a presence in the US (Equinix and DataBank), Canada (Bell Canada), and Saudi Arabia (Humain).

In February 2025, Groq secured $1.5 billion in investment from Saudi Arabia to expand AI inference infrastructure in the country. The funding will be used to support the expansion of Groq’s existing data center in Dammam, which will support the development of the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority’s (SDAIA) Arabic Large Language Model, ALLaM.

Last year saw the company closing a $640m funding round. Led by BlackRock, the round also saw participation from Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. According to the WSJ, Groq was most recently valued at $6.9bn.

Groq was co-founded in 2016 by Ross, who previously helped lead Google’s Tensor Processing Unit development. The company provides dedicated chips and accelerators within its own servers and racks designed for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing.