Groq founder to join NVIDIA as companies sign AI inference licensing deal

AI inference startup Groq has signed a licensing agreement with NVIDIA, the GPU (Graphics Processing Units) designer and manufacturing giant, for its inference technology, the former announced on Wednesday, December 24. 

The deal, non-exclusive in nature, is aimed at expanding access to high-performance, low-cost AI inference at a global scale.

As part of the agreement, Groq founder Jonathan Ross and company president Sunny Madra will be joining NVIDIA, along with other members of the Groq team. They will work on advancing and scaling the licensed technology within NVIDIA, the official statement by Groq said.

Despite the licensing deal and personnel moves, Groq will continue to operate as an independent company. Simon Edwards has been appointed as the new CEO to lead the company going forward.

While the financial terms of the licensing agreement have not been disclosed officially, media reports suggest that Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led Groq’s latest financing round, said it is approximately valued at  $20 billion in cash. If confirmed, this could be Nvidia’s largest acquisition to date, surpassing its 2019-purchase of Israeli chip designer Mellanox for around $7 billion. 

According to media reports, in an email to its employees, NVIDIA CEO Jennsen Huang stated that the company plans to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, expanding the platform to serve a broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads. 

California-headquartered Groq has assured users that GroqCloud, its inference service platform, will continue to operate without any interruption during this transition.

Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of former engineers, including Ross, one of the creators of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). It specialises in AI inference, where trained AI models respond to user requests—a market where NVIDIA faces competition from traditional rivals. 

Groq was valued at $6.9 billion in its latest financing round in September, after having raised $750 million from investors like BlackRock, Neuberger Berman, Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital.