Dec 24 (Reuters) - Nvidia has agreed to buy Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, CNBC reported on Wednesday.
While the acquisition includes all of Groq's assets, its nascent Groq cloud business is not part of the deal, the report said, citing Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup's latest financing round.
Groq is a chip startup founded by Jonathan Ross and specializes in producing AI inference chips designed to optimize pre-trained models.
The company 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.
A deal for the reported amount would mark the largest acquisition by Nvidia following its $6.9 billion deal for Mellanox Technologies.
Groq is expected to alert its investors about the deal later in the day, CNBC reported.
Nvidia and Groq did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comments.
About Groq
Groq builds and operates the inference infrastructure that powers real-time AI with the speed and cost it requires. Founded in 2016, Groq created the LPU and GroqCloud to run advanced models faster and more affordably. Groq designs its own hardware, owns the full software stack, and operates the inference platform that serves more than 2.8 million developers and leading Fortune 500 enterprises worldwide. Groq is a core part of the American AI Stack and works with partners globally to deploy and operate large-scale inference clusters.
