Nvidia has signed a licensing deal for technology from artificial intelligence competitor Groq and is hiring Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madru and other employees.
Nvidia has signed a licensing deal for technology from artificial intelligence competitor Groq and is hiring Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madru and other employees.
It was reported that Nvidia would acquire Groq’s assets for $20 billion. However, the company’s comment to TechCrunch clarified that this is not an acquisition and did not specify the amount of the deal. However, if the reported amount is true, it would be the largest deal in Nvidia’s history.
Groq is building AI chips called Language Processing Units (LPUs) that can be faster than Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). Nvidia chips are considered the industry standard for running AI models, but tests show that LPUs can outperform them. They can run LPMs 10 times faster and use 10 times less power.
As tech companies race to expand their AI capabilities, they need computing power, and Nvidia GPUs have become the industry standard. But Groq has been working on a different type of chip, called an LPU (language processing unit), which it claims can run LLM 10 times faster and use 10 times less power.
Groq CEO Jonathan Ross previously worked at Google, where he helped invent the TPU (tensor processing unit), a dedicated artificial intelligence accelerator chip.
In September, Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. The company says it powers AI applications for more than 2 million developers, up from about 356,000 last year.
