Groq

Overview Groq is the fastest LLM inference platform on the public market in 2026 — the developer facing product built on top of the company's custom LPU (Language Processing Unit) hardware, delivering open weight models like Llama 4, Qwen, and DeepSeek at throughput numbers that closed provider APIs on GPUs cannot match. If you have ever wondered what a chat app feels like when tokens stream faster than a human can read, Groq is where you find out. Founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross (one of the original Google TPU architects), Groq spent six years building a deterministic inference chip before pivoting into public API access in 2024 and becoming the de facto latency benchmark the rest of the industry gets measured against. The LPU is not a GPU repurposed for inference — it is a purpose built ASIC with a compiler scheduled memory hierarchy, which is why the throughput numbers on 70B parameter models routinely exceed 400 tokens per second and often clear 800 on smaller ones. The one line positioning: Groq is the pick when latency is the product — when the difference between a 200 ms and a 2 second time to first token changes what users can build. It does not host GPT 5 or Claude — the platform is open weight only by design — but for the open weight tier, it is the fastest option any developer can access with a credit card. The product surface is deliberately minimal: an OpenAI compatible chat completions…