Jamwaktu.com – Nvidia has once again made a major breakthrough in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The US semiconductor giant announced a significant strategic move by signing a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip startup Groq, followed by the hiring of Groq’s founder, Jonathan Ross, and several leading engineers from the Groq team to strengthen Nvidia’s technological position in the global AI chip market.
This agreement, announced on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2025, shocked the technology industry, which is entering a phase of intense competition in AI hardware development. Nvidia has formed a new partnership with Groq, where Groq’s core technology and talent will be combined to expand Nvidia’s capabilities, particularly in AI inference, the stage where trained AI models are quickly and efficiently executed in real-world applications.
Groq itself is a company known for its focus on the development of Language Processing Units (LPUs), AI accelerator chips designed to accelerate the inference process of AI models with low latency and high energy efficiency. The startup was founded by Jonathan Ross, a former Google engineer who previously contributed to the development of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the specialized AI chips used by Google in its data centers.
Under the terms of this agreement, Ross, along with Sunny Madra, President of Groq, and a number of top engineering talents from the Groq team, will join Nvidia. Nvidia stated that the recruitment of these experts will be a crucial catalyst for accelerating AI chip innovation and enhancing the performance of its AI ecosystem. Although initial media reports had suggested a full acquisition of Groq by Nvidia for around $20 billion, both parties confirmed that this is simply a technology license and employee transfer, with Groq continuing to operate as an independent entity under its new CEO, Simon Edwards.
This move by Nvidia is seen as a smart strategy to expand its influence in the field of AI inference, in addition to its long-standing dominance in the AI training sector with its graphics processing units (GPUs). Analysts noted that Groq’s LPU technology will complement Nvidia’s portfolio, especially in a market where the demand for efficiency and inference speed is growing.
However, the move has also raised several major questions from industry observers. The recruitment of Groq’s core talent and the licensing of its technology are seen by some as aggressive moves to minimize the power of potential competitors. At the same time, this solidifies Nvidia’s position as an undisputed player in the global AI chip landscape, especially amidst pressure from other major companies like AMD, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which are also actively developing their own AI solutions.
Since its founding in 2016, Groq has attracted significant investor attention with significant valuation growth, reaching approximately $6.9 billion following a $750 million funding round in September 2025. Its unique chip technology, which utilizes on-chip SRAM memory, reduces the bottleneck of external memory, enabling low latency when running AI models, although this approach also has limitations on the size of the models supported.
The recruitment of experts from Groq, who previously built leading AI chip technology at Google, gives Nvidia an unmatched competitive advantage. With the combination of advanced technology and top-tier talent, Nvidia is now strongly positioned to expand its dominance across all AI segments, from training to inference.
In the context of global technology competition, Nvidia’s move demonstrates that AI chip innovation is not just about devices, but also about talent and the technology ecosystem. The industry will continue to monitor how the implementation of Groq technology on Nvidia platforms will impact the performance of next-generation AI products and the increasingly fierce competition in the AI chip market.
