Two former Groq engineers are suing Groq’s former board and former CEO Jonathan Ross, alleging the board handed over employees and company technology to Nvidia in a $20 billion deal. The proposed class action, filed in Delaware’s Court of Chancery by Benjamin Serebrin and Joshua Rubin and unsealed Monday, alleges the deal, with a $17 billion license fee for all backers and a separate $3 billion Nvidia stock pool for engineers who transferred, kept billions from other shareholders. Meanwhile, Groq is planning to deploy its own technology, now Nvidia’s Groq 3 LPX, the Financial Times reports.

Nvidia’s annual report (10-K) books $14.4 billion of the license as goodwill “primarily attributable to the workforce and future development of the licensed technology” plus $2.5 billion for the technology itself. The plaintiffs concede that “no Delaware decision has directly answered the question this case raises,” but the deal is already under a reported Department of Justice (DOJ) inquiry. The lawsuit’s outcome has implications for future license-plus-hire deals. Groq told CNBC the suit is “meritless” and said its licensing agreement with Nvidia “delivered exceptional value for Groq, our investors, and our employees.”

The deal involved both the LPU technology and the people who built it , including Ross, a former Google TPU engineer who founded Groq in 2016. 23 FP8 PFLOPS. A single LPX rack has 256 LPUs with 128GB SRAM, 40 PB/s, and 315 FP8 PFLOPS in aggregate, as a decode co-processor for Vera Rubin NVL72. The LP30 appears to be the next-gen LPU Groq roadmapped in August 2023 on Samsung’s SF4X process with its first-gen Tensor Streaming architecture.

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