Nvidia acquires AI chip challenger Groq for $20B, report says

Nvidia is buying the AI spot startup Groq for $20 billion, according to a study from CNBC. The acquisition is expected to beryllium Nvidia’s largest ever, and with Groq connected its side, Nvidia is poised to go adjacent much ascendant successful spot manufacturing.

As tech companies vie to turn their AI capabilities, they request computing power, and Nvidia’s GPUs person emerged arsenic the manufacture standard. But Groq has been moving connected a antithetic benignant of spot called an LPU (language processing unit), which it has claimed tin tally LLMs astatine 10 times faster and utilizing one-tenth the energy. Groq’s CEO Jonathan Ross is known for this benignant of innovation — erstwhile helium worked for Google, helium helped invent the TPU (tensor processing unit), a customized AI accelerator chip.

In September, Groq raised $750 million astatine a $6.9 cardinal valuation. Its maturation has been speedy and important — the institution said that it powers the AI apps of much than 2 cardinal developers, up from astir 356,000 past year.

TechCrunch reached retired to Nvidia for comment.