Nvidia reaches technology licence agreement with start-up Groq
The world's largest listed company has paid for the right to use Groq's technology and will integrate its chip design into future products
Nvidia has entered into a licensing agreement with the artificial intelligence start-up Groq, reinforcing its investment in companies related to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products.
The world's largest listed company has paid for the right to use Groq's technology and will integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up's executives 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, the company said in a post on its website on Wednesday.
Nvidia's technology already dominates data centres, which are at the centre of the explosion in spending on the new processing 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 promote the adoption of artificial intelligence across the economy.
Groq is among the startups and companies, such as Google, that are developing their own artificial intelligence chips to compete with Nvidia. The startup, founded in 2016, raised $750m in September, with a post-funding valuation of $6.9bn. At the time, Groq said it would use the funds to expand its data centre capacity. Its data centre 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 artificial intelligence 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.
