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 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. 

The Groq deal bolsters the standing of other startups building their own AI chips, including Cerebras, D-Matrix, and SambaNova—which Intel has reportedly signed a term sheet to acquire—as well as newer players like U.K.-based chip startup Fractile. It also lifts AI inference software platform startups like Etched, Fireworks, and Baseten, strengthening their valuations and making them more attractive acquisition targets in 2026, according to analysts, founders, and investors.

Karl Freund, founder and principal analyst at Cambrian-AI Research, pointed to the Microsoft-backed D-Matrix, which raised $275 million last month at a $2 billion valuation. Like Groq, D-Matrix is focused on trading some of the fl...