GPU cloud operator Groq has hired Meta network chief Ola Kasali to bolster its engineering leadership.
Nvidia-adjacent chip firm Groq has appointed Ola Kasali as head of network and data center engineering. Kasali joins the company after nearly 12 years at Meta, where she began as a lead network engineer in 2017 before advancing to manager of network deployment and support in 2021. Prior to Meta, she held engineering roles at Freddie Mac and Sprint, which was subsequently acquired by T-Mobile US.
In a LinkedIn post announcing the appointment, Kasali wrote: “As AI capabilities grow, so does the demand for inference and the infrastructure required to deliver it at scale. Groq’s first act was pioneering the LPU (language processing unit) chip, purpose-built for AI inference. In its second act, Groq is positioned to build the world’s leading AI inference cloud, delivering the performance, reliability, and global scale required to serve the next generation of AI workloads. I’m looking forward to helping scale the network and datacenter infrastructure powering it, while building an exceptional team of infrastructure talent.”
The leadership addition follows Groq’s virtual acqui-hire by Nvidia at the start of the year. Under the arrangement, Nvidia reportedly paid $20 billion to license Groq’s technology and absorbed the company’s then-CEO, president, and additional personnel to expand its own LPU footprint. The partnership yielded tangible results in March with the debut of the Nvidia Groq 3 LPU, engineered to turbocharge ultra-low-latency AI inference workloads. Nvidia’s LPU-based, rack-scale platform is currently in full production ahead of a commercial launch expected later this year.
Groq currently deploys its static random access memory (SRAM) inference chips across 13 data centers spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. In August, the company secured $350 million in funding at a $3.5 billion valuation. Nvidia was listed as a planned participant in the round, with Groq stating the capital will support medium and large clusters of Nvidia-accelerated computing for both training and inference. The investment also funds Groq’s plan to scale its compute capacity from 54 megawatts (MW) to more than 200 MW by 2027 as it expands its GroqCloud inference offering.
Kasali will oversee a networking estate that includes Cisco Nexus 9000 switches. Earlier this year, her predecessor Cameron Ferdinands highlighted the hardware’s critical role in promotional materials, noting that Cisco’s equipment allows the company “to move massive volumes of data with unparalleled speed and low latency that is foundational to unlocking the full potential of Groq’s innovative fast inferencing solutions.”
Notably, Ferdinands has served as Nvidia’s head of network and data center engineering since February. With Kasali stepping into the identical title at Groq, the parallel appointments indicate the company maintains a degree of operational autonomy and separation from Nvidia despite the earlier strategic integration.