Nvidia strikes a deal with Groq, an AI chip start-up

Nvidia 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.

- STEPHEN NELLIS

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 specialises in what is known as inference, where artificial intelligence models that have already been trained respond to requests from users. While Nvidia 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.