Nvidia has agreed to license chip technology from startup Groq and hire away its CEO, a veteran of Alphabet\u2019s Google, Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The deal follows a familiar \u200dpattern in \u200brecent years where the world\u2019s biggest technology firms pay large sums in deals with promising startups to take their technology and talent but stop short of formally acquiring the target.<\/p>\n
Groq specializes in what is known as inference, where artificial intelligence models that have already been trained respond to requests from users. While Nvidia dominates the market for training AI models, it faces much more competition \u2060in inference, where traditional rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices have aimed to challenge it as well as startups such as Groq and Cerebras Systems.<\/p>\n
Nvidia has agreed to a \u201cnonexclusive\u201d license to Groq\u2019s technology, Groq said. It said its founder Jonathan Ross, who helped Google start its AI chip program, as well as Groq President Sunny Madra and other members of its engineering team, will join Nvidia.<\/p>\n
A \u200cperson close to Nvidia confirmed \u200dthe licensing agreement.<\/p>\n
Groq did not disclose financial details of the deal. CNBC reported that Nvidia had agreed to \u200dacquire Groq for $20-billion in cash, but neither Nvidia nor Groq \u200ccommented on the report. Groq said in its blog post that it will continue to \u2060operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards as CEO and that its cloud business will continue operating.<\/p>\n
In similar recent deals, Microsoft\u2019s \u200btop AI executive came through a $650-million deal with a startup that was billed as a licensing fee, and Meta spent $15-billion to hire Scale AI\u2019s CEO without acquiring the entire firm. Amazon hired away founders from Adept AI, and Nvidia did a similar deal this year. The deals have faced scrutiny by regulators, though none has yet been unwound.<\/p>\n
\u201cAntitrust would seem to be the \u200bprimary risk here, though structuring the deal as a nonexclusive license may keep the fiction of competition alive (even as Groq\u2019s leadership and, we would presume, technical talent move over to Nvidia),\u201d Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday after Groq\u2019s announcement. And Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang\u2019s \u201crelationship with the Trump administration appears among the strongest of the key US tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Groq more than doubled its valuation to $6.9-billion from $2.8-billion in August last year, following a $750-million funding round in \u2060September.<\/p>\n
Groq is one of a number of upstarts that do not use external high-bandwidth memory chips, freeing them \u2060from the memory crunch affecting the global chip industry. The approach, which uses a form of on-chip memory called SRAM, helps speed up interactions with chatbots \u200cand other AI models but also limits the size of the model that can be served.<\/p>\n
Groq\u2019s primary rival in the approach is Cerebras Systems, which Reuters this month reported plans to go public as soon as next year. Groq and Cerebras have signed large deals in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Nvidia\u2019s Huang spent much of his biggest keynote speech of 2025 arguing that Nvidia would be able to maintain its lead \u200cas AI markets shift from training to inference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nvidia has agreed to license chip technology from startup Groq and hire away its CEO, a veteran of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-367257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}