Exclusive: Nvidia buying AI chip startup Groq's assets for about $20 billion in largest deal on record

Nvidia has agreed to purchase assets from Groq, an AI accelerator chip designer, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led Groq's latest funding round. This acquisition is by far Nvidia's largest, dwarfing the $7 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2019. Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, and other senior leaders will join Nvidia to advance the licensed technology, though Groq will continue as an independent company led by Simon Edwards as CEO, with its GroqCloud business excluded from the deal. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated the integration of Groq's low-latency processors will expand Nvidia's AI factory architecture for real-time workloads, clarifying that Nvidia is licensing IP and adding employees, not acquiring Groq as a whole entity. Groq, founded by former Google TPU engineers, was recently valued at $6.9 billion in September and was targeting $500 million in revenue this year amid high demand for AI inference chips.

(Source：CNBC)