Nvidia has licensed intellectual property from inferencing chip designer Groq, and hired away some of its senior executives, but stopped short of an outright acquisition.
“We’ve taken a non-exclusive license to Groq’s IP and have hired engineering talent from Groq’s team to join us in our mission to provide world-leading accelerated computing technology,” an Nvidia spokesman said Tuesday, via email. But, he said, “We haven’t acquired Groq.”
Groq designs and sells chips optimized for AI inferencing. These chips, which Groq calls language processing units (LPUs), are lower-powered, lower-priced devices than the GPUs Nvidia designs and sells, which these days are primarily used for training AI models. As the AI market matures, and usage shifts from the creation of AI tools to their use, demand for devices optimized for inferencing is likely to grow.
