Groq has chosen Sydney for its first Asia-Pacific deployment, marking a significant step in the company’s global AI infrastructure rollout. The AI inference specialist is standing up capacity in an Equinix data center in the city, giving Australian customers closer access to its high-speed systems. This move follows previous launches in the United States and Europe and signals Groq’s intention to compete aggressively in cloud-scale AI inference worldwide.
Strategic Move into Asia-Pacific
By selecting Sydney as its initial Asia-Pacific hub, Groq is positioning itself at the heart of one of the region’s most active technology markets. The company’s presence is designed to bring fast, low-cost, and scalable AI inference closer to enterprises and public sector organizations across Australia. For local customers, it reduces reliance on distant regions for compute, helping address latency, cost, and data residency concerns.
High-Performance Infrastructure with Equinix
Under its partnership with Equinix, Groq will deploy a 4.5 megawatt facility that is expected to become one of Australia’s largest dedicated AI inference sites. Groq says its architecture can deliver up to five times faster performance at lower cost compared with traditional GPUs and major hyperscale clouds. The combination of scale, performance, and efficiency is aimed at production-grade AI workloads where inference speed directly impacts user experience and operating margins.
Connectivity, Latency, and Data Sovereignty
The deployment makes use of Equinix Fabric, the company’s software-defined interconnection service that links enterprises to infrastructure and partners worldwide. Through this fabric, organizations in Asia-Pacific can tap into GroqCloud with secure, high-speed, low-latency connections rather than relying solely on the public internet. This setup is designed to help customers maintain tighter control over data, meet compliance requirements, and uphold data sovereignty within their jurisdiction.
Early Adoption by Australian Customers
Groq is already serving customers in Australia, including design platform giant Canva, which is integrating Groq-powered inference into its AI capabilities. Use cases range from improving the responsiveness of AI features that shape user creativity to boosting internal productivity tools that rely on real-time inference. Canva’s leadership has highlighted how advances in local AI and compute infrastructure can accelerate creative workflows for the platform’s more than 260 million users.
Leadership Perspectives on the Expansion
Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross has framed the expansion as a response to a global shortfall in available compute for AI builders. He emphasizes that partnering with Equinix in Australia is a concrete way to widen access to high-performance AI inference, rather than limiting it to a handful of hyperscale providers. Equinix Asia-Pacific president Cyrus Adaggra, for his part, points to the company’s digital ecosystems and global footprint as key enablers for Groq’s rapid scale-up and for enterprise AI workflows at production scale.
Company Backgrounds
Founded in 2016, Groq has focused on building dedicated inference infrastructure, including its Language Processing Unit and the GroqCloud platform. The company positions itself as a core part of the American AI stack and reports a base of more than two million developers and numerous Fortune 500 customers. Its value proposition centers on lowering the cost and increasing the speed of AI inference so that more organizations can move from experimentation to full-scale deployment.
Equinix, listed on Nasdaq as EQIX, operates a vast network of interconnected data centers that underpin digital infrastructure around the world. The company pitches its platform as a way for enterprises to shorten the path to partners, networks, and cloud services while delivering consistent performance. In the context of AI, Equinix’s sites and interconnection services increasingly function as neutral hubs where emerging infrastructure providers like Groq can meet enterprise demand at scale.
Groq’s new Sydney presence deepens the company’s global footprint and gives Australian organizations a local option for high-speed AI inference. Backed by Equinix’s infrastructure and connectivity fabric, the deployment blends performance, cost efficiency, and compliance considerations that are central to enterprise AI adoption. As demand for AI compute continues to outpace traditional supply, moves like this are likely to shape how and where the next generation of AI applications are built and delivered.