Two people familiar with the matter said the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether NVIDIA sought to evade antitrust review in last year’s deal with AI chipmaker Groq. Groq described the transaction as a "non-exclusive license agreement" allowing NVIDIA to use chips Groq developed for AI workloads. As part of the arrangement, Groq CEO Jonathan Ross and COO Sunny Madra joined NVIDIA. Regulators note similar licensing-plus-hire deals can be used to sidestep automatic merger reviews de

Two people familiar with the matter said the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether NVIDIA sought to evade antitrust review in last year’s deal with AI chipmaker Groq. Groq described the transaction as a "non-exclusive license agreement" allowing NVIDIA to use chips Groq developed for AI workloads. As part of the arrangement, Groq CEO Jonathan Ross and COO Sunny Madra joined NVIDIA. Regulators note similar licensing-plus-hire deals can be used to sidestep automatic merger reviews designed to assess competitive harm.