Nvidia licenses Groq AI inference tech in reported $20B mega deal

This deal is less about one more chip IP license and more about who will own the economics of inference in a world saturated with frontier models. Groq’s LPUs have marketed themselves on ultra‑low latency and high throughput for LLMs; by bringing that architecture in‑house via licensing and talent, Nvidia is hedging against a future where GPUs aren’t always the best tool for serving AI at scale. It’s a way to neutralize a promising rival while folding its ideas into the Nvidia ecosystem without the antitrust baggage of a full acquisition.

For the race to AGI, controlling inference is as important as controlling training. AGI‑class systems will only matter if they can be deployed cheaply and reliably into products; that’s an inference problem. Nvidia is effectively spending a huge sum to ensure that, whatever direction inference hardware goes, it will sit under the CUDA and Nvidia software umbrella. That keeps developers, cloud providers and model labs locked into its stack at the very moment when specialized inference ASICs looked like a credible escape hatch.

The move also sends a chilling signal to the rest of the AI hardware startup world: if you get too good at something Nvidia cares about, the best‑case outcome may be a very expensive, very one‑sided “partnership” rather than true independent scale.