After Nvidia’s Groq deal, meet the other AI chip startups that may be in play—and one looking to disrupt them all

Nvidia dropped a surprise announcement on Christmas Eve: a $20 billion deal to license AI chip startup Groq’s technology and bring over most of its team, including cofounder and CEO Jonathan Ross. It was a move that hinted Nvidia is no longer assuming its GPUs will not be the only chips useful for the next big phase of AI deployment: running already trained AI models to do everything from answering queries and generating code to analyzing an image—a process known as inference—and doing so at a huge scale.