Groq announced it has entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq's inference technology. Groq CEO Jonathan Ross and team will join Nvidia, but Groq will operate independently with GroqCloud.
News of a licensing deal landed as CNBC reported that Nvidia was buying Groq.
CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring Groq for $20 billion. CNBC's David Faber cited Groq investor Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, has his primary source. Groq, founded in 2016, had a valuation pushing $7 billion.
Groq’s secret sauce is a processor it calls the LPU (language processing unit). ‘The LPU integrates hundreds of MB of SRAM as primary weight storage (not cache), cutting latency and feeding compute units at full speed. This enables efficient tensor parallelism across chips, a practical advantage for fast, scalable inference,” said Groq.
Groq's LPU is designed specifically for efficient AI inference.
Following the CNBC report, Groq announced it has entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq's inference technology. Groq statement in full:
“Today, Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology. The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference.
As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology.
Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer.
GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption."
The Groq-Nvidia deal rhymes with how Meta handled the Scale AI deal. In that deal, Meta invested in Scale and gave it a valuation of $29 billion. Scale's founder Alexandr Wang agreed to work for Meta and now leads its AI efforts.
In the end, Nvidia will get Groq's AI accelerator chip technology no matter what you call the deal. The Groq purchase would be Nvidia's largest.
