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David Senra: Jonathan Ross, Founder of Groq

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Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq and the inventor of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), now a senior executive at NVIDIA following the company's $20 billion partnership with Groq. Before Groq, Ross built something that didn't exist: a custom AI chip at Google called the TPU, which became the backbone of DeepMind's AlphaGo — the system that defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. After watching the TPU push AlphaGo's ELO score up by hundreds of points overnight, Ross grasped a principle that would define his next decade: faster inference produces more capable models. He left Google to act on it. Groq's first decade was brutal. Early West Coast VCs passed — and would later watch as NVIDIA announced what Ross describes as the firm's largest deal by nearly 3x. Ross came within weeks of running out of money. Rather than lay off the engineers he needed to hit a critical product milestone, he created "Groq bonds" — war-bond–style instruments that exchanged salary for equity. About 80% of the team participated; nearly half took statutory minimum wage. They saved two months of runway and kept the company alive. The core bet Ross made — that fast inference would matter — w

David Senra: Let's start with this 20 billion-dollar, rumored 20 billion-dollar partnership that you have with NVIDIA. Jonathan Ross: Mm. David Senra: Can you talk about the structure of the deal and how it came about? Jonathan Ross: So, the most interesting part about it is the call, where the idea was first floated, was about three weeks before the money was in the bank. David Senra: Oh, so Jensen moves fast. Jonathan Ross: Of course. That's how you stay ahead. David Senra: Yeah. So, how'd it come about? Jonathan Ross: So, we had been working on integrating GPU and LPUs together, and the…

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