NVIDIA has decided to Buy different Groq assetsa startup founded in 2016 and dedicated to the design of high-performance AI accelerator chips. Specifically, these are Groq’s investment assets, for which it will pay $20 billion in cash, in addition to incorporating several of its executives into the company.
As confirmed by Groq itself in a post on its blog, both parties have reached an asset purchase agreement, but without revealing the Price. The one who offered details to CNBC about the amount was Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive and responsible for executing Groq’s latest financing round, which closed in September.
According to CNBC, in this round Groq raised $750 million, raising its valuation to $6.9 billion. Among the investors that participated in the round are Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, Samsung, Cisco and Altimeter.
The signed agreement is classified as “non-exclusive”, and according to its terms, its founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, as well as the company’s President, Sunny Madra, among other executives, will become part of Nvidia to work on the advancement of the licensed technology.
Groq will continue to operate as an independent company, with new management. Leading the company will be Simon Edwards, until now CFO of Groq. Its cloud division will not be part of the transaction, and according to the company, GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
This operation is the most expensive in NVIDIA’s history, surpassing the purchase of Mellanox in 2019, for which it paid almost $7 billion. As communicated by the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, to his employees through an internal message, the purchase of group assets is intended to expand the capabilities of Nvidia, which already plans to integrate Groq’s low-latency chips into the architecture of the NVIDIA AI factory.
In this way, NVIDIA to expand its platform to support more AI inference and real-time workloads. In addition, Guang has specified that although they are incorporating Groq employees into their workforce, in addition to licensing part of their intellectual property, they have not purchased the company as such.
