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Nvidia has struck a licensing deal with artificial intelligence startup Groq, bolstering its investments in companies tied to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products.
The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and will integrate its chip designs into future products. Some executives from the startup will leave the company to join Nvidia to contribute to this project, the two companies said. Groq will continue as an independent company with a new CEO, it said in a post on its website Wednesday.
Nvidia’s technology already dominates data centers, which are at the center of the explosion in spending on new computing resources needed for AI software and services. The popularity of its existing offerings has made Nvidia by far the richest company in the chip industry, and it has said it will use some of that money to boost the adoption of artificial intelligence across the economy.
Groq is among the startups and companies, like Google, that are developing their own artificial intelligence chips to compete with Nvidia. The startup, founded in 2016, raised $750 million in September, with a post-funding valuation of $6.9 billion. At the time, Groq said it would use the funds to expand its data center capacity. Its data center business, which offers outsourced computing services, will continue, the company said in the post.
Groq CEO Jonathan Ross is a former Google Chip executive who helped start the company’s Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, which powers AI workloads. As part of the deal, he and other senior executives will join Nvidia “to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” Groq said in the statement.
