Nvidia has acquired the assets of Groq, a developer of high-performance AI accelerator chips, for $20 billion. This was reported by Disruptive CEO Alex Davis, according to CNBC.
His firm has invested over $500 million in the startup since its inception in 2016.
Three months ago, Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. The round included participation from Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter, and 1789 Capital, associated with Donald Trump Jr.
“We have entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for the use of our inference technology. It reflects the companies’ shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low-cost inference execution,” states a blog post by Groq.
As part of the agreement, company founder Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, and other team members will join Nvidia. There, they will focus on developing and scaling the licensed technologies.
Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards as CEO.
The financial details of the agreement have not been disclosed. However, according to Davis, Nvidia acquired all of the startup’s assets except for its nascent cloud business.
“GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption,” noted Groq representatives in the blog.
The deal marks Nvidia’s largest acquisition in its history. In 2019, it acquired chip developer Mellanox for nearly $7 billion.
Company CEO Jensen Huang stated that the agreement will enhance the corporation’s capabilities.
“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI Factory architecture, expanding the platform to serve an even broader range of AI tasks and real-time workloads,” wrote the entrepreneur.
He emphasized that this is not an acquisition of Groq as a company.
Earlier in December, as part of its expansion in the open-source sector, Nvidia acquired SchedMD and released the Nemotron 3 line of AI models.