Jonathan Ross
Background
Jonathan Ross studied mathematics and computer science. He began his career at Google, where he worked as an engineer at Google X and Google Brain, co-founding and designing the core microarchitecture of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).
Role at Groq, Inc.
Jonathan Ross is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Groq, Inc. While at Google in 2013, Ross incubated and developed the original Google TPU as a '20% project', creating the specialized accelerator chip that powered AlphaGo's historic victory over Lee Sedol and became Google's primary AI compute engine. Recognizing that future AI systems would be bottle-necked by non-deterministic GPU memory architectures during real-time inference, Ross departed Google in 2016 to found Groq. As CEO, Ross invented the Language Processing Unit (LPU), raised over $1.0 billion in institutional capital from BlackRock and Cisco, scaled GroqCloud to over 500,000 developers, and built Groq into a $2.8 billion AI silicon powerhouse generating over $100 million in annual revenue. Ross's technical legacy is immortalized through his invention of the Google TPU, which revolutionized machine learning acceleration across Google Search, Translate, and DeepMind's AlphaGo. At Groq, Ross directs overall corporate strategy, semiconductor roadmaps, and global cloud infrastructure alliances. A vocal advocate for software-defined silicon and open foundation models, Ross has positioned Groq as the essential high-speed execution layer powering real-time conversational intelligence worldwide. At Google, Ross observed firsthand that computing architectures were reaching a critical inflection point where memory communication was outstripping arithmetic processing capacity. His design for the TPU proved that domain-specific architectures could revolutionize computing. At Groq, Ross took this insight to its ultimate conclusion, establishing a software-first engineering discipline that eliminated hardware speculation, resulting in the most predictable, low-latency AI inference engine ever built.