Nvidia buys AI chip startup Groq's assets for $20 billion in the company's biggest deal ever — Transaction includes acquihires of key Groq employees, including CEO
Groq, a rival to Nvidia in the AI chip race, has entered into a non-exclusive agreement with the Green Team, with a deal valued at $20 billion, roughly $13 billion more than Groq's last evaluation. Nvidia will also hire the firm's founder and CEO, along with its President, as part of the biggest purchase it's ever made.
(Image credit: Getty Images / Bloomberg)
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Nvidia, the largest GPU manufacturer in the world and the linchpin of the AI data center buildout, has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip rival Groq to use the company's intellectual property. The deal is valued at $20 billion and includes acquihires of key employees within the firm who will now be joining Nvidia. The firm spent $7 billion for Israeli chip company Mellanox in 2019, so the record has now been toppled.
Nvidia is the largest benefactor of the AI boom because it supplies most of the world's data centers and has deals with essentially every AI constituent. Groq has accused Nvidia in the past of predatory tactics over exclusivity, claiming that potential customers remain fearful of Nvidia's inventory allotment if they're found talking to competitors, such as Groq, historically. Those concerns seem to have been laid to bed with the deal.
“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads... While we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq’s IP, we are not acquiring Groq as a company.” — Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO (as per CNBC).
The LPU Groq is built upon (Image credit: WikiChip)
Earlier this year, Groq built its first data center in Europe to counter Nvidia's AI dominance, shaping up to be an underdog story that challenged a behemoth on cost-to-scale. Now, Groq's own LPUs will be deployed in Nvidia's AI factories, as the license covers "inference technology," according to .
