Nvidia to License AI Chip Challenger Groq’s Tech and Hire Its CEO

Nvidia has entered into a non-exclusive licensing 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 that Nvidia is acquiring Groq's assets for $20 billion. Nvidia told TechCrunch that this is not an acquisition of the company and declined to comment on the deal's scope. If CNBC's figures are accurate, the transaction would reveal the largest purchase Nvidia has ever made. With Groq's technology and talent joining its ecosystem, Nvidia stands to further strengthen its dominance in chip manufacturing.

As technology companies race to expand their AI capabilities, the demand for computing power continues to surge, with Nvidia's GPUs becoming the industry standard. Groq, however, has been developing a different type of chip, known as an LPU (language processing unit). The company has claimed its LPU can run large language models up to 10 times faster while using only one-tenth the energy.

Groq's CEO, Jonathan Ros, is known for pioneering AI hardware innovation. During his tenure at Google, he helped develop the TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), a custom accelerator designed for AI workloads.

In September, Groq raised $750 million at a $6.9 billion valuation. The company has grown rapidly, stating that its technology now supports AI applications used by more than 2 million developers, up from roughly 356,000 the previous year.

Updated Dec. 24, 2025, at 5:40 p.m. ET, with clarification from Nvidia regarding the nature of the deal.