Nvidia’s $20B Groq bet goes live this year with new AI racks

Nvidia just turned a $20 billion licensing deal into working hardware. The company confirmed that its Groq 3 LPX low-latency AI inference system has entered full production and will be operational before the end of the year, marking one of the fastest deal-to-deployment timelines in recent AI infrastructure history. The system, which packs 256 language processing units into a liquid-cooled design, is the first tangible product of Nvidia’s blockbuster licensing agreement with inference chip startup Groq, signed on Christmas Eve 2025. Nebius will be the first company to deploy it through its Token Factory platform. How a licensing deal became a production rack in eight months The deal that produced this hardware was unusual by semiconductor industry standards. Rather than acquiring Groq outright, Nvidia paid $20 billion for a non-exclusive license to Groq’s LPU (language processing unit) designs, selectively hired key personnel including Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, and left Groq standing as an independent company. Simon Edwards now leads Groq, which operates 13 data centers globally. The Groq 3 LPX sits within Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, the company’s broader next-generatio...