Nvidia Inks $20 Billion Deal With AI Chip Maker
Credit: Nvidia
Nvidia has entered into a strategic partnership with Groq, a startup specializing in developing processors to accelerate neural networks. As part of the $20 billion deal, Nvidia licensed Groq’s technology and acquired its key assets.
For its $20 billion, Nvidia is acquiring not only Groq’s skilled specialists but also the rights to use its developments, albeit under non-exclusive licensing terms. Furthermore, Groq’s nascent cloud business will continue to exist independently. Nvidia intends to integrate the low-latency processors developed by Groq into its own “AI factory” architecture. These will be used for inference and real-time computing workloads.
This isn’t the first such deal for Nvidia in recent months. In September, it spent over $900 million to recruit Enfabrica’s CEO and other specialists, as well as to license the startup’s technology. Overall, the emergence of significant cash reserves amid the AI boom has fueled Nvidia’s investment activity. In September, it agreed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, but the relationship has not yet been finalized. As part of its partnership with Intel, Nvidia also committed to investing $5 billion in Intel.
The deal was the largest in Nvidia’s history. The previous record was held by the acquisition of Israeli networking solutions developer Mellanox in 2019 for nearly $7 billion.
