By Tim Bradshaw
Publication Date: 2025-12-24 23:36:00
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Nvidia is scooping up the founder and other top talent from Groq, one of the most prominent start-ups aiming to challenge the chipmaker’s dominance in artificial intelligence processors.
Jonathan Ross, a former Google chip engineer who founded Groq in 2016, and the start-up’s president Sunny Madra, are among those who will join Nvidia as part of a technology licensing deal, the two companies announced on Christmas Eve.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in an email to staff that the Groq deal would “expand the capabilities” of the data centres that were built around its chips, which he calls “AI factories”.
“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the Nvidia AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” he wrote in the email, which was seen by the Financial Times.
Despite the loss of much of its leadership team, Groq said it “will continue to operate as an independent company”.
Groq has focused on developing chips that can accelerate AI “inference”, the process of returning responses to users’ queries via chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
The start-up was valued at $6.9bn as recently as September, when it raised $750mn in funding. Groq claims its language processing units are up to 10 times more…
