Groq vs SambaNova

Groq — Hardware · Private · $3.5B valuation · 3 of 3 figures sourced  |  SambaNova — Hardware · Private · $11B valuation · 4 of 4 figures sourced

Relationship

Sacra's SambaNova competitive analysis names Groq directly as a rival inference-cloud provider. SambaCloud and GroqCloud are both hosted-inference offerings and share the serve-a-model need.

2 of 2 capabilitiesShared product typeLarger scaleSourced competitorServe a model in production

2 of 2 capabilities — Shares accelerator silicon and model inference.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship hardware and model API.

Ludbee product records

Larger scale — SambaNova: $11B valuation, against Groq's $3.5B valuation.

Ludbee scale figures · valuation, market cap or revenue estimate

Sourced competitor — “Groq similarly focuses on low-latency inference through its Language Processing Units and GroqCloud service.”

sacra.com · checked 2026-09-19

Serve a model in production — Rivals on this job — Run a trained model behind an API at scale — hosted endpoints, GPU capacity, routing, and the cost and latency trade that comes with them.

Ludbee needs vocabulary · the scope on the sourced edge

Aligned comparison

FieldGroqSambaNova
Valuation$3.5B$11B SambaNova has 3.1× more
Employees—425
Founded20162017 1 yrs later
StatusPrivatePrivate match
CategoryHardwareHardware match
Stack layerHardware, Model APIHardware, Infrastructure service, Model API
HeadquartersMountain View, USASan Jose, USA

Capability overlap

Shared · 2

Accelerator siliconModel inference

Not verified for Groq · 2

AI compute hardwareServer systems

Recorded for SambaNova. Groq’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Groq has no capability SambaNova lacks, among the 2 recorded here.

Products, side by side

Hand-checked pairing

Groq

Model API

GroqCloudModel API

Hosted inference service that serves open-weight models on Groq's own LPU hardware, billed per token.

Hardware

Groq LPU (GroqChip)Hardware

The Language Processing Unit (LPU) — Groq's own inference accelerator chip (GroqChip), deployed 256 per rack across Groq's own data centers. Not sold or licensed as standalone hardware today: access comes bundled into GroqCloud or into the dedicated regional deployments Groq itself builds and operates for governments and telecoms.

SambaNova

Model API

SambaCloudModel API

Hosted inference service serving open-weight models on SambaNova's own RDU hardware, billed per token.

Hardware

SambaNova RDUHardware

Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit accelerators designed to run large models at low latency.

SambaRackHardware

Air-cooled, rack-scale AI inference hardware system integrating 16 SN50 RDU chips per rack (scalable across multiple racks); accessed via on-premises deployment, SambaCloud, or contact-sales for enterprise/government deployments.

No counterpart

SambaNova sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Groq yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Infrastructure service

SambaStackInfrastructure service

Full-stack AI system pairing SambaNova's RDU hardware with its serving software, deployed in a customer's own data centre.

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