Aramco Digital taps $7.5B fund to 'create Google for the Middle East'

Fans of science fiction writer Robert Heinlein will be familiar with grok, his multipurpose Martian word whose essential meaning is to understand. They may be less au fait with Groq, a Silicon Valley startup that took inspiration from Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein's man-from-Mars novel, in naming itself.

Founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, the former Google executive behind the Internet giant's tensor processing units (TPUs), Groq is working on another type of chip called a language processing unit (LPU). So far, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has relied heavily on the graphical processing units (GPUs) made by Nvidia to train the large language models (LLMs) that underpin applications like ChatGPT. Where alternatives such as Groq's LPUs fit is in the next chapter of the story, and what experts refer to as AI "inferencing" (more on that later).

Groq stands out for all sorts of reasons. It has a funky name. It has a boss who built the AI silicon used by Google. It sealed a contract with Samsung's foundry business last year to produce 4-nanometer chips. And it is also a partner of Saudi Aramco, the Middle Eastern energy giant with bulging pockets and technology ambitions that soar higher than Jeddah Tower.

That follows Aramco's establishment last year of a subsidiary called Aramco Digital, which will have access to some of the $7.5 billion held by Aramco Ventures, the company's venture capital arm. It has lured Tareq Amin, previously in charge of telecom business for Japan's Rakuten, to run Aramco Digital, giving him the daunting mission to "go ahead and create Google for the Middle East," as he describes it.

Do you Groq it?

When Amin recently met Light Reading at the appropriately swanky W hotel in Barcelona, he emphasized this would not mean building vast data centers or connecting them with fiber, jobs that have already been done in Saudi Arabia by companies that include the US hyperscalers. Through Aramco Cloud – which sits alongside Connect, Intelligence, Secure and Solutions as one of five units under Amin's jurisdiction – Aramco Digital has instead formed partnerships with Google and others, besides channeling some funds into its own sovereign cloud. Thanks to an internally developed multicloud orchestration tool, customers visiting an Aramco Digital marketplace can select the platform they prefer.

The role that Amin envisages is on the software side and doing what he calls "AI-infrastructure-as-a-service" for companies in Saudi Arabia and other countries across the Middle East and North Africa. It's an untapped opportunity he values at $149 billion between now and 2030, citing external research. "I am positive there is not a single AI-infrastructure-as-a-service company in the Middle East," Amin said.

To him, the chief regional pain point today is poor access to advanced AI chips, which is where Groq and others enter the story. According to the plan shared with Light Reading, Aramco Digital will secure access to those chips and then lease them on a pay-as-you-go basis to its customers in the Middle East. "You offer an amazing opportunity to researchers and developers, who don't need to wait to jump into the AI ecosystem and can play with it and experiment," said Amin. "If Aramco Digital under its Cloud business unit offers this as a service, it will fast track the transformation of the entire region."

Groq especially excites Amin because it could dovetail with his own software activities. Rather than building an LLM from scratch, Aramco Digital has cherry-picked from the open source community and done some fine-tuning on specific data sets. On top of that, it has slapped an orchestration layer that is "intent-based," essentially meaning the user can issue a simple instruction and let AI carry out the necessary tasks. The result is a new AI-powered operating system dubbed Nour OS (nour meaning light in Arabic), which is being shown off at Saudi Arabia's Leap 2024 technology event this week. And Groq could suit it better than any GPU.

While Nvidia's muscular chips are needed for the hard job of LLM training, more power-efficient options might replace them in AI inferencing, when applications based on those fully trained LLMs are rolled out. They could include more sophisticated AI voice assistants and chatbots supported by Nour OS. "To make AI function as a human does, of course, it needs to evolve in its capability to understand intent, but latency also has to be real time," said Amin. "The new inferencing chipsets and companies like Groq have made latency near real time."

An enterprise world without apps

His lofty goal with Nour OS – described as a "next-generation enterprise operating system" – is to substitute AI for the visible apps used in the enterprise. The initial deployment within Aramco Digital meant an employee could use an AI "prompt" to find out how many vacation days remained, instead of sending emails to HR managers, rifling through HR guidebooks or making use of specific online tools.

"Imagine you don't see a single app on your Mac tomorrow but prompts," said Amin. "The difference between our prompt and ChatGPT is that it understands intent and carries actions, and they can be anything." A more complicated use case has involved open radio access network (RAN) technology. After an integration of Nour OS with Intel silicon, Aramco Digital used simple voice commands to provision a policy controller (used to manage resources) with specific variables. "Just by declaring intent, we provision this in seconds without having to worry about manual efforts to carry through configuration and customer information and IP address management," said Amin.

Aramco Digital now has 12 use cases for Nour OS covering finance, legal, HR and open RAN areas. It is incorporating the relevant ones into its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and Amin says he wants the "whole company" to run on Nour OS by the end of this year. But there is a go-to-market plan, too. "Anyone can take this OS and build their own app that takes advantage of the foundation layers we are building in the architecture," said Amin. The message, essentially, is that Aramco Digital takes care of the rest in its "AI-infrastructure-as-a-service" guise.

The aspiration, it seems, is to be a kind of AI facilitator for the region. It's a description Amin likes. "That is the dream," he said. "This is a marketplace for AI but we're taking the headaches of deployment out of your way. You don't have to worry about infrastructure. You don't have to worry about finding GPUs or finding TPUs or finding any other infrastructure, or about how to create the data platform or the GenAI implementation."

If it seems a small miracle that Aramco Digital has been able to conceive and build its tools so fast, Amin says dipping into today's proliferation of open source platforms made a huge difference. Developing Nour OS took four months from scratch. In the future, with the "low code, no code" phenomenon, he expects software to be written even quicker. "Eighty percent to 90% of any code you write could be handled by AI today," he said. "And we're on a path where the AI will write much more efficient and cleaner code."

The man who introduces grok to Earth comes to an unpleasant end in Stranger in a Strange Land. For Groq, the outlook seems brighter. "There are three or four startups that I think could change this world in a good way," said Amin, with reference to AI inferencing chipsets but without naming any specific players. Groq, whose last funding round happened in April 2021, has so far raised $362.6 million from multiple venture funds, according to Crunchbase. And Amin expresses a willingness to invest in "many startups" in this space. Aramco certainly has the means.