Nvidia has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with fellow AI chip company Groq. This deal includes Nvidia hiring Groq’s founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other team members.
While CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring Groq assets for $20 billion, Nvidia informed TechCrunch that this transaction is not a full company acquisition and declined to elaborate on its scope. Should CNBC’s figures prove accurate, this would be Nvidia’s largest acquisition to date, potentially further cementing its dominance in chip manufacturing with Groq’s contributions.
As technology firms vie to enhance their AI capabilities, the demand for computing power is immense, with Nvidia’s GPUs becoming the industry benchmark. However, Groq has been developing a distinct chip known as an LPU (language processing unit), which it asserts can execute LLMs up to ten times faster while consuming only a tenth of the energy. Groq CEO Jonathan Ross is recognized for such inventive contributions; during his tenure at Google, he played a role in creating the TPU (tensor processing unit), a specialized AI accelerator chip.
Last September, Groq secured $750 million, valuing the company at $6.9 billion. Its expansion has been rapid and substantial; Groq reports that it supports the AI applications of over 2 million developers, a significant increase from approximately 356,000 in the previous year.
Updated, 12/24/25 at 5:40 p.m. ET, with clarification from Nvidia about the nature of the deal.