Nvidia has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip company Groq and will bring Groq’s founder and president into the company, as questions remain over the scale of assets involved in the deal.
Licensing Agreement And Executive Hires
Under the agreement, Nvidia said it will hire Groq founder Jonathan Ross, Groq president Sunny Madra, and other employees. Nvidia confirmed the licensing arrangement but said it is not acquiring Groq as a company.
Conflicting Reports On Deal Size
CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring assets from Groq valued at $20 billion. Nvidia told TechCrunch that the transaction is not an acquisition and declined to comment on the scope or valuation of the assets involved.
If the $20 billion figure reported by CNBC is accurate, the transaction would represent Nvidia’s largest purchase to date.
Competing Chip Approaches
Nvidia’s graphics processing units have become the standard hardware used to train and run large AI models, as demand for computing power has increased across the technology sector. Groq has pursued an alternative design through its language processing unit, or LPU.
Groq has said its LPU can run large language models at speeds up to ten times faster while using one-tenth the energy of existing solutions. Ross is closely associated with this approach. Before founding Groq, he worked at Google, where he helped develop the tensor processing unit, a custom AI accelerator.
Groq’s Growth And Funding
In September, Groq raised $750 million in funding at a valuation of $6.9 billion. The company said it now supports AI applications built by more than 2 million developers, compared with about 356,000 developers a year earlier.
Featured image credits: Roboflow Universe
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