The startup’s CEO and some staff are to join Nvidia as part of new nonexclusive deal, a sign of growing demand for cutting-edge AI chips.

Nvidia Corp. agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence startup Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of

Groq, a rival to Nvidia in the AI chip race, has entered into a non-exclusive agreement with the Green Team, with a deal valued at $20 billion, roughly $13 billion more than Groq's last evaluation. Nvidia will also hire the firm's founder and CEO,

Nvidia has agreed to a "non-exclusive" license to Groq's technology, Groq said. It said its founder Jonathan Ross, who helped Google start its AI chip program, as well as Groq President Sunny Madra and other members of its engineering team, will join Nvidia.

A new type of dealmaking is on the rise in Silicon Valley as Nvidia reaches a non-exclusive deal with a chip startup and hires its top engineers.

By combining Groq's inference technology with its own GPU ecosystem, Nvidia is positioning itself to control the full lifecycle of AI computation.

The deal was first reported as an exclusive with CNBC on Wednesday. Alex Davis, the CEO of Disruptive, the company that led Groq's latest financing round, said Nvidia has agreed to buy Groq's assets for $20 billion in cash, the news outlet reported.

At the heart of the agreement is a massive transfer of high-level talent. Jonathan Ross, Groq's founder and the original architect of Google's TPU program, will join NVIDIA alongside Groq's president, Sunny Madra, and other key team members to scale the licensed technology.