Nvidia has agreed to pay $20 billion to buy assets from Groq, a developer of high-performance artificial ielligence accelerators.
According to CNBC, Groq announced in a blog post that it has eered io a non-exclusive licensing agreeme with Nvidia for its inference technology. Upon completion of the transaction, Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, along with company preside Sonny Madera and other senior executives, will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology.
Groq is a startup founded by former Google engineers
Groq also said it will coinue to operate as an independe company, with Simon Edwards, the company’s chief financial officer, taking over as CEO.
Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s last funding round in September, told CNBC that Nvidia will receive all of Groq’s assets, and that the company’s fledgling cloud computing business, GroqCloud, is not part of the deal. Groq also announced that GroqCloud will coinue to operate without any ierruption.
This deal is by far the biggest acquisition in Nvidia’s history. The company’s previous largest acquisition dates back to 2019, when it bought Mellanox for nearly $7 billion. At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investmes. This figure was around 13.3 billion dollars in early 2023.
“Jensen Huang”, the CEO of Nvidia, announced that this agreeme will expand Nvidia’s capabilities. “We plan to iegrate Groq’s low-latency processors io Nvidia’s AI Factory architecture, expanding the platform to cover a wider range of AI inference workloads and real-time processing,” he wrote in an email.
It is ieresting to know that Groq was founded by the engineers of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU); A chip that competes with Nvidia in AI workloads.
