Nvidia has entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip developer Groq and will hire several of the startup’s senior leaders, including founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross and President Sunny Madra. The move underscores Nvidia’s efforts to strengthen its position in AI computing as demand for faster and more efficient hardware grows.
CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring assets from Groq for $20 billion, though Nvidia said the transaction does not constitute an acquisition of the company and declined to comment on the deal’s financial scope. If confirmed, the transaction would represent Nvidia’s largest asset purchase to date.
Groq has developed a language processing unit designed specifically for large language model inference. The company has said its chips can deliver significantly faster performance while consuming less energy than conventional GPU-based systems. Ross previously helped develop Google’s tensor processing unit, one of the earliest custom AI accelerators.
Groq raised $750 million in September at a valuation of $6.9 billion and said its technology supports AI applications used by more than 2 million developers. The licensing deal comes as Nvidia faces increasing interest in alternative AI chip architectures from cloud providers and enterprise customers.
