AI chip rival Groq has signed a limited-licensing deal with Nvidia. NVIDIA will also bring on Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees as part of the deal.
NVIDIA is buying Groq’s assets for $20 billion (CNBC). NVIDIA told TechCrunch this isn’t a company acquisition, and didn’t comment on deal details. However, if you trust the CNBS numbers, this will be the biggest purchase Nvidia has ever made, and with Groq at its side, Nvidia is the new king of the chips.
As tech companies race to scale their AI efforts, they want computing power, and Nvidia GPUs are becoming the de facto industry standard. However, Groq has been developing a chip of its own — an LPU (language processing unit) — one of several chip types for which it has promised LLMs will run 10 times faster and use one-tenth the energy.
CEO Jonathan Ross is the type of person who likes doing this sort of thing, having previously helped create a custom accelerator chip (TPU, or tensor processing unit) for AI at Google.
Groq announced $750 million in September at a $6.9 billion valuation. The company said this week that it powers the AI apps of over 2 million developers, an increase from around 356,000 last year — a rapid, large-scale growth by any measure.
