Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products.
The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products.
Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said.
Photo: Reuters
Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web site.
Nvidia’s technology already dominates data centers that are at the heart of the explosion in spending on new computing needed for AI software and services. The popularity of its existing offerings has made Nvidia by far the richest company in the chip industry, and it has said it would use some of that cash to advance the uptake of AI across the economy.
Groq is among the start-ups and companies such as Alphabet Inc’s Google that are developing their own AI chips to rival Nvidia.
The start-up, which was founded in 2016, raised US$750 million at a post-funding valuation of US$6.9 billion in September. At the time, Groq said it would use the funds to expand its data center capacity.
Its data center business, which offers outsourced computing, would continue, the company said.
Groq chief executive officer Jonathan Ross is a former Google chip executive who helped start that company’s tensor processing unit, which powers AI workloads.
As part of the deal, he and other top executives would join Nvidia “to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” Groq said.
No financial details were released.
The licensing deal is similar in some ways to a partnership Meta Platforms Inc reached with data labeling start-up Scale AI, in which the big tech company made a sizeable investment in the smaller firm, licensed technology and hired its CEO.
Nvidia has been making investments in companies across the AI infrastructure ecosystem and is trying to keep a large lead in the market for inference — running models once they have been developed.
Under the leadership of chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), the company has already pledged billions to a wide variety of projects that it believes would further the overall AI industry.
Nvidia agreed to invest as much as US$100 billion in OpenAI and has even bought a stake in erstwhile nemesis Intel Corp.
By incorporating a new type of design into what it sells, Nvidia is showing willingness to be flexible and add novel capabilities. That approach is likely aimed at keeping its biggest customers and new adopters focused on its technology as in-house efforts from Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc are gaining momentum amid an industry rush to install as much computing capacity as quickly as it can.
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