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Groq, the artificial intelligence inference startup, is making an aggressive play to challenge established cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google with two major announcements that could reshape how developers access high-performance AI models.
The company announced Monday that it now supports Alibaba’s Qwen3 32B language model with its full 131,000-token context window — a technical capability it claims no other fast inference provider can match. Simultaneously, Groq became an official inference provider on Hugging Face’s platform, potentially exposing its technology to millions of developers worldwide.
The move is Groq’s boldest attempt yet to carve out market share in the rapidly expanding AI inference market, where companies like AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure have dominated by offering convenient access to leading language models.
“The Hugging Face integration extends the Groq ecosystem providing developers choice and further reduces barriers to entry in adopting Groq’s fast and efficient AI inference,” a Groq spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Groq is the only inference provider to enable the full 131K context window, allowing developers to build applications at scale.”
How Groq’s 131k context window claims stack up against AI inference competitors
Groq’s assertion about context windows — the amount of text an AI model can process at once — strikes at a core limitation that has plagued practical AI applications. Most inference providers struggle to maintain speed and cost-effectiveness when handling large context windows, which are essential for tasks like analyzing entire documents or maintaining long conversations.
Independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis measured Groq’s Qwen3 32B deployment running at approximately 535 tokens per second, a speed that would allow real-time processing of lengthy documents or complex reasoning tasks. The company is pricing the service at $0.29 per million input tokens and $0.59 per million output tokens — rates that undercut many established providers.
Groq and Alibaba Cloud are the only providers supporting Qwen3 32B’s full 131,000-token context window, according to independent benchmarks from Artificial Analysis. Most competitors offer significantly smaller limits. (Credit: Groq)
“Groq offers a fully integrated stack, delivering inference compute that is built for scale, which means we are able to continue to improve inference costs while also ensuring performance that developers need to build real AI solutions,” the spokesperson explained when asked about the economic viability of supporting massive context windows.
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