Nvidia Corp. has agreed to a licensing deal with AI chip startup Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom.
As part of the Nvidia-Groq deal, Groq’s Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross and other top executives will join Nvidia “to help advance and scale licensed technology,” Groq said in a statement on its website on Wednesday. That’s noteworthy since Ross was one of the creators of Google’s tensor processing unit—a custom AI chip seen as an alternative to Nvidia’s pricier GPUs.
While no financial details were released, Groq said it will continue to operate as an independent company and its cloud business remains in operation.
Earlier, CNBC reported Nvidia was set to acquire Groq in a $20-billion, all-cash deal, in what would’ve been its biggest acquistion till date.
Nvidia has risen to become the world’s most-valuable company on the strength of its GPUs that train AI models. The Santa Clara, California-based company led by Jensen Huang is making investments in firms across the AI ecosystem, in an attempt to keep a lead in the market for AI inference—running large language models once they have been developed. That includes a plan to invest up to $100 billion in Sam Altman’s OpenAI Inc., which has committed to deploy at least 10 GW of Nvidia products.
It’s worth noting here that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini are locked in a rivalry for bragging rights as the AI Chatbot of choice globally.
Founded in 2016, Groq is among the startups that are developing their own AI chips to rival Nvidia, as well as Google. It designs AI inference chips to optimise pre-trained large language models.
In September 2025, Groq raised $750 million from Disruptive, Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr is partner. The investment more than doubled the Mountain View, California-based company’s valuation to $6.9 billion from $2.8 billion in August 2024.
