Nvidia Welcomes Groq's Pioneering Minds in AI Chip Engineering

Expanding its foothold in the booming AI sector, Nvidia has embarked on a new venture by integrating key personnel and entering into a licensing agreement with Groq, a notable player in AI hardware.

According to a recent announcement from Groq, they are now under a non-exclusive licensing arrangement with Nvidia, allowing Nvidia access to their inference technology, while Groq maintains its independence.

At the forefront of Groq's offerings is their Language Processing Unit, a bespoke chip crafted specifically for AI inference tasks—essentially the application of AI models in decision-making and prediction scenarios. As of a valuation earlier this year, Groq was valued at approximately $6.9 billion and had secured $750 million in fresh funding.

Groq mentioned that as part of this arrangement, their Founder Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, along with other team members, will transition to Nvidia. This move aims to enhance and extend the capabilities of the licensed technology.

An insider disclosed to Business Insider that Nvidia’s deal with Groq does not constitute a full acquisition. Details regarding the financial terms of the agreement remain undisclosed by both parties.

Jonathan Ross and Douglas Wightman, once part of Google’s team of engineers, were pivotal in initiating the development of Google’s inaugural TPU chips. These TPUs, designed to boost machine learning tasks, are direct competitors to Nvidia's GPUs. The duo eventually left Google to establish Groq.

This collaboration between Nvidia and Groq is part of a growing trend of innovative business strategies in Silicon Valley, where acqui-hiring becomes a new norm. Traditional paths for startups often focus on IPOs or full acquisitions, but acqui-hiring tends to benefit only a select group of highly skilled employees and founders.

For instance, back in 2024, Google chose to license technology from Character.AI with a hefty investment of $2.5 billion, bringing on board only its two notable cofounders and a fraction of its workforce. Similarly, AI developers Adept and Inflection inked agreements with giants Amazon and Microsoft.

Meta has recently made headlines with its strategic acquisition of talent from Scale AI, committing approximately $14 billion for a significant stake, while integrating Scale AI's CEO, Alexandr Wang, into the Meta Superintelligence Labs leadership team.

However, not every acqui-hire story ends favorably. The crew at Windsurf found themselves in uncertainty when a lucrative acquisition deal with OpenAI fell through. Though Google ended up securing Windsurf's leadership and top talent, the remaining staff were absorbed by Cognition.