India, Dec. 25 -- Nvidia Corp. has agreed to a licensing deal with AI chip startup Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom.

As part of the Nvidia-Groq deal, Groq's Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ross and other top executives will join Nvidia "to help advance and scale licensed technology," Groq said in a statement on its website on Wednesday. That's noteworthy since Ross was one of the creators of Google's tensor processing unit-a custom AI chip seen as an alternative to Nvidia's pricier GPUs.

While no financial details were released, Groq said it will continue to operate as an independent company and its cloud business remains in operation.

Earlier, CNBC reported Nvidia was set to acquire Groq in a $20...