NVIDIA acquires Groq assets
NVIDIA has agreed to buy assets from startup Groq, a designer of high-performance AI accelerator chips, for $20 billion.
In September 2025, Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. Investors in this funding round included was led by Disruptive with significant investment from Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, DTCP and a large US-based West Coast mutual fund manager. The raise also included continued support from Samsung, Cisco, D1, Altimeter, 1789 Capital, and Infinitum.
“Inference is defining this era of AI, and we’re building the American infrastructure that delivers it with high speed and low cost,” explained Jonathan Ross, Founder and CEO, Groq.
In a blog post announcing the news, Groq explained 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 the agreement, Groq’s founder Jonathan Ross, and Groq’s President, Sunny Madra, alongside other members of the team, will join NVIDIA to help advance and scale the technology.
Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer.
Sean Hehir, CEO, AI chip manufacturer BrainChip, sees this as a key moment for the industry at large: “More than anything, NVIDIA’s acquisition of Groq is a bellwether indication that cloud-native, data centre powered inference training will ultimately take a back seat to more specialised, effective, and efficient hardware that is better equipped for Edge AI applications.
“Inference training on the Edge is magnitudes more efficient than Cloud-based inferencing and will solve for many of the limitations the industry is currently facing with soon-to-be “legacy” AI infrastructure, such as power consumption and latency.”
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