US authorities investigate one of Nvidia's largest AI deals

The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia's deal with AI chip developer Groq, checking whether it was structured in a way to avoid the standard antitrust review that applies to traditional mergers and acquisitions.

This is reported by The New York Times, citing two people familiar with the course of the investigation.

Nvidia and Groq announced the agreement in December 2025. Formally, the companies did not conduct an acquisition: Groq called the agreement a "non-exclusive licensing agreement" under which Nvidia gained access to the startup's technologies to accelerate the operation of artificial intelligence models.

At the same time, Groq founder Jonathan Ross, company president Sunny Madra, and a number of other employees moved to Nvidia. Groq itself continued to exist as an independent company, and its cloud service GroqCloud continued to operate.

According to The New York Times, the US Department of Justice began a review shortly after the announcement of the deal and sent Nvidia an official request to provide information about its structure.

The regulator is clarifying whether such a structure allowed Nvidia to effectively obtain the key technologies and the team of a competitor without formalizing a traditional acquisition. Such deals do not automatically undergo the same procedure of preliminary antitrust control as large mergers and asset acquisitions.

If the Department of Justice finds violations, Nvidia could face a fine. At the same time, the sources of the publication consider it unlikely that the company will be forced to completely cancel the agreement with Groq. The investigation is still ongoing, and the regulator may not find any violations.

The financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed by the parties when it was announced. At the same time, US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, who previously demanded a review of the agreement, estimated it at approximately $20 billion.

They called the deal an example of a so-called reverse acquihire: a large technology company licenses the developments of a startup and poaches its key team, but does not formally buy the company itself. In the senators' opinion, such operations can act as effective acquisitions and weaken competition without going through the usual regulatory procedure.

Nvidia's position in the global market for AI accelerators attracts particular attention to the deal. Groq specializes in chips for inference - the stage at which an already trained AI model processes user requests. Its processors were considered as one of the alternatives to Nvidia's graphics accelerators for certain types of workloads.

At Nvidia, they said that the deal with Groq is an example of the work of the American system, which stimulates innovation, rewards entrepreneurs, and benefits consumers. The US Department of Justice declined to comment on the specific investigation.

After the deal, Groq continues to develop its own business. In 2026, the company attracted new funding to expand its cloud infrastructure and deepened cooperation with Nvidia.

Based on materials from: The New York Times, Groq, the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren