The US Justice Department is examining whether Nvidia deliberately structured its licensing deal with inference chip designer Groq in a way that avoided antitrust review, according to a New York Times report.
The Justice Department opened its inquiry shortly after the deal was announced in December and has since sent Nvidia a formal request for information. If investigators find wrongdoing, they could seek fines, although forcing Nvidia to unwind the deal is considered unlikely.
The structure of the deal is what matters in this case. Nvidia took a non-exclusive licence to Groq’s chip technology and hired several of its executives, including founder Jonathan Ross, but it did not buy the company. A merger has to be reported to regulators and can be blocked. A technology licence followed by a round of hiring looks, at least on paper, like two normal business decisions.
“The Groq story is a prime example of the American system working as designed to promote innovation, reward entrepreneurs, and benefit consumers,” an Nvidia spokesperson said.
That defends the result, but it does not really answer the question at the centre of the investigation: whether the structure itself was designed to avoid scrutiny.
