Nvidia has now entered into a non-exclusive licensing deal with AI hardware startup Groq. As part pf the agreement the chipset major is also bringing its founder and several other top executives in a move which underscores Nvidia’s aggressive expansion in the AI era. Groq announced that Jonathan Ross, its founder and CEO along with the company’s president and other senior engineers will now join Nvidia. Despite this talent shift, the AI hardware startup will continue to operate independently as this deal is just a licensing partnership and not an acquisition. “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,” said the company in a blog post.Neither Nvidia not Groq have disclosed the financial terms of the licensing deal.
Groq’s AI Hardare Edge
Groq is known for its Language Processing Unit (LPU) which is a custom chip designed for AI inference, the process by which trained models made predictions or take decisions. The startup was valued ay $6.9 billion just three months ago and it also managed to raise $750 million in its latest round of funding. Also, Ross and Groq engineer Douglas Wightman has earlier worked at Google, where he helped the company in developing its first Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs). It is important to note that TPUs were specialised chips that rival Nvidia’s GPUs in acceearung large-scale machine learning tasks.
Nvidia’s AI expansion
Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company with a market cap above $4.5 trillion, has been aggressively expanding its AI footprint. The Groq deal reflects a growing trend in Silicon Valley: acqui-hire style agreements, where companies license technology but selectively hire founders and top talent.The trend of acquiring and hiring
- Google & Character.AI (2024): $2.5 billion licensing deal, but only hired the cofounders and 20% of staff.
- Amazon & Adept / Microsoft & Inflection (2024): Similar talent-focused deals.
- Meta & Scale AI (2025): $14 billion investment for a 49% stake, bringing CEO Alexandr Wang to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs.
- OpenAI & Windsurf (failed deal): A $3 billion near-acquisition collapsed, leaving hundreds of employees in limbo while Google and Cognition absorbed top engineers.
