Item 1 of 2 This illustration taken on August 25, 2025 shows the NVIDIA logo. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The deal follows a common pattern in recent years in which the world's largest technology companies pay large sums of money in deals with promising startups, acquiring their technology and talent but never formally acquiring the target.
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Groq said NVIDIA has agreed to a “non-exclusive” license to Groq's technology. Founder Jonathan Ross, who helped launch Google's AI chip program, and Groq president Sunny Madra, along with other members of the engineering team, will join NVIDIA, the company announced.
A person close to Nvidia confirmed the licensing agreement.
Groq did not disclose financial details of the transaction. CNBC reported that Nvidia had agreed to buy Groq for $20 billion in cash, but neither Nvidia nor Groq would comment on the report. Groq said in a blog post that it will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards as CEO and will continue its cloud business.
“While the primary risk here appears to be antitrust, structuring this deal as a non-exclusive license could perpetuate the fiction of competition (although Groq's leadership and likely technology talent would move to NVIDIA),” Bernstein analyst Stacey Rasgon wrote in a note to clients after Groq's announcement on Wednesday. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said, “Our relationship with the Trump administration appears to be the strongest of any major U.S. technology company.''
Groq is one of the startups that doesn't use external high-bandwidth memory chips, relieving itself of the memory shortage affecting the global chip industry. This approach, which uses a form of on-chip memory called SRAM, can help speed up interactions with chatbots and other AI models, but it also limits the size of models that can be delivered.
Nvidia's Huang spent much of 2025's biggest keynote arguing that Nvidia can maintain the lead as the AI market shifts from training to inference.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco. Additional reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru. Editing: Shailesh Kuber, Matthew Lewis, William Mallard
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