<div id="readability-page-1">(This December 24 story has been repeated without any changes to the text.) By Stephen Nellis Dec 24 (Reuters) - Nvidia ( NVDA ) has agreed to license chip technology from startup Groq and hire away its CEO, a veteran of Alphabet's Google, Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday. The deal follows a familiar pattern in recent years where the world's biggest technology firms pay large sums in deals with promising startups to take their ‌technology and talent but stop short of formally acquiring the target. Groq specializes in what is known as inference, where artificial intelligence models that have already been trained respond ​to requests from users. While Nvidia ( NVDA ) dominates the market for training AI models, it faces much more competition in inference, ‍where traditional rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices have aimed to challenge it as well ⁠as startups such as Groq ⁠and Cerebras Systems. Nvidia ( NVDA ) has agreed to a &#34;non-exclusive&#34; license to Groq's technology, Groq said. It said its founder Jonathan Ross, who helped Google start its AI chip ‌program, as well as Groq President Sunny Madra and other members ​of its engineering team, will join Nvidia ( NVDA ). A person close to Nvidia ( NVDA ) confirmed the licensing agreement. Groq did not disclose financial details of the deal. CNBC reported that Nvidia ( NVDA ) had agreed to acquire Groq for $20 billion ⁠in cash, but neither Nvidia ( NVDA ) nor Groq commented on the ‍report. Groq said ​in its blog post that it will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards as CEO and that its cloud business will continue operating. In similar recent deals, Microsoft's top AI executive came through a $650 ‍million deal with a startup that was billed as a licensing fee, and Meta spent $15 billion to hire Scale AI's CEO without acquiring the entire firm. Amazon hired away founders from Adept AI, and Nvidia ( NVDA ) did a similar deal this year. The deals have faced scrutiny by regulators, though none has yet been unwound. &#34;Antitrust would seem to be the primary risk here, though structuring the deal as a non-exclusive license may keep the fiction of competition alive (even as Groq's leadership and, we would ​presume, technical ‍talent move over to Nvidia ( NVDA )),&#34; Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday after Groq's announcement. And Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang's &#34;relationship with the Trump administration appears among the strongest of the key ​US tech companies.&#34; Groq more than doubled its valuation to $6.9 billion from $2.8 billion in August last year, following a $750 million funding round in September. Groq is one of a number of upstarts that do not use external high-bandwidth memory chips, freeing them from the memory crunch affecting the global chip industry. The approach, which uses a form of on-chip memory called SRAM, helps speed up interactions with chatbots and other AI models but also limits the size of the model that can be served. Groq's primary rival in the approach is Cerebras Systems, which Reuters this ​month reported plans to go public as soon as next year. Groq and Cerebras have signed large deals in the Middle East. Nvidia's ( NVDA ) Huang spent much of his biggest keynote speech of 2025 arguing that Nvidia ( NVDA ) would be able to maintain its lead as AI markets shift from training to inference. (Reporting by ‍Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber, Matthew Lewis and William Mallard)</div>

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Nvidia has agreed to license chip technology from startup Groq and hire its CEO, Jonathan Ross, along with other executives. This move is part of a trend where major tech firms acquire technology and talent from startups without full acquisition. Groq will continue operating independently. The deal, structured as a non-exclusive license, aims to maintain competition. Financial details were not disclosed, but CNBC reported a $20 billion acquisition, which was not confirmed by either company.

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Nvidia, joiningÂ Big Tech deal spree, to license Groq technology, hire executives