What is Groq and what is it used for?
Groq is an AI inference company that built the LPU chip and sells access to it through GroqCloud, an API for running trained language, vision and speech models.
The company describes itself as founded in 2016. The LPU is designed to run models, not to train them, and the official site says it relies on SRAM memory instead of the HBM used by GPUs. That description of performance and architecture comes from Groq itself.
In practice, Groq serves teams that already know which model they want and need an API to call it from a product: a chatbot, audio transcription, image analysis, an agent with tools. The endpoints follow the OpenAI API format. According to the documentation, you only change the base URL to Groq's address and use a GroqCloud key.
Groq also publishes its own Python and TypeScript libraries. The catalog of hosted models changes over time, so the current list always lives in the GroqCloud documentation.






