Nvidia plans to license technology from AI chip startup Groq, and hire its leadership team.

Groq will remain an independent business led by finance head Simon Edwards, and the company's GroqCloud service is set to continue uninterrupted.

Founder and current CEO Jonathan Ross will join Nvidia, along with president Sunny Madra and other members of the Groq team.

Ross previously lead Google's Tensor Processing Unit development, leaving to found Groq in 2016. The company raised $750 million in September at a $6.9bn valuation.

“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the Nvidia AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an email employees.

Terms of the non-exclusive licensing deal were not disclosed. CNBC initially reported that Nvidia was set to acquire Groq for $20 billion, but has since claimed that is the price of the licensing deal. The number has not been independently verified.

“While we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq’s IP, we are not acquiring Groq as a company," Huang said in his email.

In September, Nvidia spent $900m to license networking technology from Enfabrica and hire some of its staff, in a similar deal.