Nvidia has signed a non-exclusive license agreement with AI chip competitor Groq. As part of the deal, Nvidia will hire Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra and other employees.
CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring assets from Groq for $20 billion. Nvidia told TechCrunch that this is not an acquisition of the company and declined to comment on the scope of the deal. But if CNBC's numbers are accurate, the acquisition is expected to be Nvidia's biggest ever, and with Groq on its side, Nvidia is poised to become even more dominant in chip manufacturing.
As technology companies race to improve AI capabilities, computing power is needed, and Nvidia's GPUs have emerged as the industry standard. However, Groq is working on a different type of chip called an LPU (language processing unit), which it claims can run LLM 10 times faster and consume 10 times less power. Groq CEO Jonathan Ross is known for this type of innovation. While working at Google, he helped invent the TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), a custom AI accelerator chip.
In September, Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. The company says its growth has been rapid and significant, powering AI apps for more than 2 million developers, up from about 356,000 last year.
Updated on December 24, 2025 at 5:40 PM ET with clarification from Nvidia regarding the nature of the transaction.