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Nvidia is searching for founders and other top talent from Groke, one of the most prominent start-ups aimed at challenging the chipmaker’s dominance in artificial intelligence processors.
Jonathan Ross, a former Google chip engineer who founded Grok in 2016, and Sunny Madra, the start-up’s president, are among those who will join Nvidia as part of a technology licensing deal, the two companies announced on Christmas Eve.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in an email to employees that the Groke deal would “expand the capabilities” of the data centers that were built around its chips, which he calls “AI factories.”
“We plan to integrate Grok’s low-latency processors into the Nvidia AI Factory architecture, expanding the platform to serve a broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” he wrote in the email, which was seen by the Financial Times.
Despite losing most of his leadership team, Grok Said It “will continue to operate as an independent company”.
Groke has focused on developing chips that can speed up AI “inference”, the process of answering users’ questions through chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
The start-up was valued at $6.9 billion as recently as September, when it raised $750 million in funding. Groke claims that its language processing units are 10 times more energy efficient than graphics processing units produced by Nvidia and its main rival AMD.
Before moving to Groke, Ross helped launch Google’s AI Tensor Processing Unit Chips program. TPU is widely seen as a key asset in Google’s AI arsenal, helping its Gemini chatbot catch up with ChatGPT by OpenAI, which largely relies on Nvidia chips.
Several big tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta and Google, have struck licensing deals with start-ups that bring in top talent and assets without an outright acquisition, following increased antitrust scrutiny over the sector’s dealmaking in recent years.
“Antitrust would appear to be the primary risk here, although structuring the deal as a non-exclusive license may keep the competition fantasy alive,” said Stacey Rusgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research, in a note to clients about Nvidia’s deal with Groke.
Grok said its agreement with Nvidia “reflects our shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low-cost inference”.
The collaboration comes as many of Nvidia’s biggest customers are developing their own AI processors or exploring alternatives to its GPUs, including the adoption of Google’s TPUs.
The FT reported last week that Amazon was in talks to invest more than $10 billion in OpenAI as part of a deal that would see the ChatGate developer use more of the ecommerce giant’s Trennium series of AI chips.
Nvidia has struck a series of high-value investment deals this year, including agreeing to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI.
The company achieved a record valuation of $5 trillion in late October, but has seen its shares decline as concerns grow about the sustainability of the AI ​​boom. Nvidia’s stock is up 36 percent year to date, while Google parent company Alphabet’s shares are up 66 percent over the same period, driven by growing investor excitement about its latest Gemini model.
Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy and Michael Acton
