Nvidia Corp. is said to have agreed to buy AI chip startup Groq for $20 billion cash, in what is potentially its biggest acquisition till date.
Groq is expected to alert its investors about the Nvidia deal later in the day, CNBC reported on Wednesday, citing Disruptive CEO Alex Davis who said “the deal came together quickly”. His company led Groq’s latest funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $6.9 billion. The acquisition includes all of Groq’s assets, but its nascent cloud business is not part of the deal.
Founded in 2016, Groq designs AI inference chips to optimise pre-trained large language models. Its Founder CEO Jonathan Ross was one of the creators of Google’s tensor processing unit—a custom AI chip seen as an alternative to Nvidia’s pricier graphics processing units.
In September 2025, Groq raised $750 million from investors including 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.
Groq was not pursuing a sale when it was approached by Nvidia.
For Nvidia, Groq—not to be confused with Elon Musk-led xAI’s chatbot Grok—would mark the biggest acqusition since its $7-billion deal for Israeli chipmaker Mellanox Technologies in 2019. Since then, the company led by Jensen Huang has announced its intention to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, which has committed to deploy at least 10 GW of Nvidia products.
At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash, up from $13.3 billion in early 2023. Groq is targeting revenue of $500 million this year.
