Chip giant Nvidia has agreed to a reported USD 20 billion (approx Rs 1.8 lakh crore) non-exclusive licensing deal with AI hardware startup Groq, marking
its largest acquisition-scale move yet as it doubles down on the AI boom, with Groq set to operate independently even as key executives join Nvidia. On Wednesday, December 24, Groq announced in a blog post that it has entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for its inference technology, though the financial terms were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Groq’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, along with company president Sunny Madra and other senior executives, will join Nvidia to help develop and scale the licensed technology, the post stated. The deal reflects a familiar trend in recent years, with the world’s largest technology companies paying substantial sums to secure a startup’s technology and talent while stopping short of a formal acquisition, says a report by Reuters. The world's largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq's technology and will integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the startup's executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq will continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said Wednesday in a post on its website, according to a report by Bloomberg. Nvidia’s technology already dominates data centers at the center of the surge in spending on the computing power required for AI software and services. The success of its existing products has made Nvidia by far the wealthiest company in the chip industry, and it has said it plans to use some of that cash to help accelerate the adoption of AI across the economy. According to a report by Bloomberg, Groq is among the startups and companies, such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, that are developing their own AI chips to rival Nvidia. The startup, which was founded in 2016, raised USD 750 million at a post-funding valuation of USD 6.9 billion in September. At the time, Groq said it would use the funds to expand its data center capacity. Its data centre business, which offers outsourced computing, will continue, the company said in the post. Founded in 1993, NVIDIA is the world leader in accelerated computing. Their invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, revolutionized accelerated computing, ignited the era of modern AI, and is fueling industrial digitalization across markets. NVIDIA is now a full-stack computing infrastructure company with data-centre-scale offerings that are reshaping the industry. Jonathan Ross is the CEO and founder of Groq. Established in 2016 for inference, Groq is the AI inference platform delivering low cost, high performance without compromise. Its custom LPU and cloud infrastructure run today’s most powerful AI models instantly and reliably.
