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Nvidia acquires AI chip challenger Groq for $20B, report says

Nvidia is buying the AI chip startup Groq for $20 billion, according to a report from CNBC. The purchase is expected to be Nvidia’s largest ever, and with Groq on its side, Nvidia is poised to become even more dominant in chip manufacturing.

As tech companies compete to grow their AI capabilities, they need computing power, and Nvidia’s GPUs have emerged as the industry standard. But Groq has been working on a different type of chip called an LPU (language processing unit), which it has claimed can run LLMs at 10 times faster and using one-tenth the energy. Groq’s CEO Jonathan Ross is known for this sort of innovation — when he worked for Google, he helped invent the TPU (tensor processing unit), a custom AI accelerator chip.

In September, Groq raised $750 million at a $6.9 billion valuation. Its growth has been quick and significant — the company said that it powers the AI apps of more than 2 million developers, up from about 356,000 last year.

TechCrunch reached out to Nvidia for comment.

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