Nvidia Licenses AI Chip Technology to Challenger Groq and Hires Its CEO

AMD has reached a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip rival Groq. As part of the deal, AMD will bring on board Groq’s founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madera, along with other key personnel.

According to CNBC, AMD is acquiring assets from Groq for $20 billion. While AMD confirmed to TechCrunch that this is not a full acquisition of the company, it declined to disclose specific details about the scope of the transaction. However, if CNBC's figure is accurate, this would mark AMD's largest acquisition to date, further strengthening its position in the semiconductor industry with Groq’s advanced technology and talent.

As tech firms race to enhance their artificial intelligence capabilities, demand for high-performance computing has surged, with AMD's GPUs becoming a standard in the field. Meanwhile, Groq has been developing an alternative type of processor known as an LPU (Language Processing Unit), which reportedly runs large language models (LLMs) at 10 times the speed while consuming only one-tenth the power. Jonathan Ross, Groq’s CEO, is renowned for his pioneering work in AI hardware—in his prior role at Google, he played a key role in creating the TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), a custom-built AI accelerator chip.

In September, Groq successfully raised $750 million, reaching a valuation of $6.9 billion. The company has experienced rapid growth—claiming to support AI applications for over 2 million developers, a significant increase from approximately 356,000 just a year earlier.