The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into a licensing deal between Nvidia and AI-chip startup Groq, examining whether the arrangement was designed to avoid formal antitrust review. Under the deal, Groq gave Nvidia access to its AI inference chip technology, and Groq’s CEO and COO both moved over to Nvidia, while Groq itself stayed a separate company. Reports put the value of the package between $17 billion and $20 billion.
Nvidia is currently the dominant supplier of AI chips worldwide, and regulators are increasingly concerned that a handful of companies control both the hardware and the rules for how that hardware gets used. A “license-plus-talent” deal that behaves like an acquisition — without triggering a formal merger review — is exactly the kind of structure lawmakers have started calling a stealth takeover.
For anyone following the AI hardware space, this case could set an important precedent for how future chip and AI deals get structured — and whether Nvidia’s dominance keeps expanding largely unchecked.