Nvidia Signed a Special Technology Deal with Groq for $20 Billion
Groq and Nvidia enter non-exclusive technology licensing agreement to accelerate AI inference at global scale
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on December 26, 2025 at 2:02 pmToday, 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.
Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of CEO.
GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
Comments
Boom!!
Amazing news again from Nvidia who signed a technology deal with Groq for $20 billion. In fact, it appears that it is not a classic acquisition as Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia, confirmed that Nvidia is not acquiring Groq as the company. Groq will continue to exist as a separate entity. It reminds me what the GPU giant did with Enfabrica a few months ago. This deal arrives 3 months after last Groq's round with $750 million at $6.9 billion valuation. But at that price, it represents a parallel path that could be seen as an special acquisition, in other words why pay $20 billion to access technology non exclusively?
It is interesting to notice that this new form of deal accelerates access to technology rather than spending time with regulation and legal authorities and some hypothetical confirmations. Time to market is here a key dimension and the non-exclusive technology access answers monopoly aspect. Here Nvidia will have the right to use Groq's technology and invite key people to join its team.
It confirms the active race and battle in the inference area among key and top AI chip designers and makers as new pressure arises on the market from Google,
Amazon, OpenAI, even Meta plus Asia. This race is illustrated also by some other moves like the $14 billion investment by Meta in Scale.AI, Microsoft in Inflection.AI, Amazon in Adept.AI or Google in Character.AI.
Groq belongs of the small group of AI chip players with SambaNova and Cerebras to list 2 other very active vendors. Cerebras announced a Series G round last September as well of $1.1 billion at $8.1 billion valuation and plans an IPO in the coming months. This will probably trigger as well some modern partnerships. SambaNova is in talk with Intel to be acquired for $1.6 billion. Does this Nvidia/Groq deal could influence the value of SambaNova, we'll see. And of course AMD is joining the battle.
The IT Press Tour visited Groq in January 2024 in Mountain View, CA, and we all realized the foundation, infrastructure and services, Jonathan Ross, CEO and his team, were building and continue to do.
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