Dispatch·AI Hardware & Compute··
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Groq's Saudi Deal Relocates the Inference Layer
Groq's Saudi partnership and $640M raise hand infrastructure control to Riyadh — the hardware layer beneath frontier AI has a new sovereign.
The debate over AI chip geopolitics has centered on training — export controls on H100s, TSMC access, the China chip ban. Inference was treated as a commodity problem, solved by whoever could cut costs fastest. Groq's Saudi deal [6] reveals that framing as dangerously incomplete. A facility built to cover half of global AI computing demand, running on purpose-built LPUs rather than general-purpose GPUs [8], is not a cost optimization — it is a structural dependency. The labs routing inference through GroqCloud have already placed a sovereign bet they did…