Nvidia to license AI chip challenger Groq’s tech and hire its CEO

Nvidia has obtained 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 Nvidia acquiring Groq assets for $20 billion; Nvidia told TechCrunch that this is not a corporate acquisition and did not comment on the scope of the deal. But if CNBC’s numbers are correct, this purchase is expected to be Nvidia’s largest ever, and with Groq at its side, Nvidia is poised to become even more dominant in chip manufacturing.

As tech companies compete to boost their AI capabilities, they need computing power, and Nvidia’s GPUs have become the industry standard. But Groq has been working on a different type of chip, called an LPU (language processing unit). has claimed that it can conduct LLMs ten times faster and uses a tenth of the energy. Groq’s CEO Jonathan Ross is known for this type of innovation. While working for 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 growth has been rapid and significant: the company said it powers the AI ​​apps of more than 2 million developers, up from about 356,000 last year.

Updated, 12/24/25 at 5:40 PM ET, with clarification from Nvidia on the nature of the deal.