Nvidia just admitted the general-purpose GPU era is ending

Nvidia’s $20 billion strategic licensing deal with Groq represents one of the first clear moves in a four-front fight over the future AI stack. 2026 is when that fight becomes obvious to enterprise builders.

For the technical decision-makers we talk to every day — the people building the AI applications and the data pipelines that drive them — this deal is a signal that the era of the one-size-fits-all GPU as the default AI inference answer is ending.

We are entering the age of the disaggregated inference architecture, where the silicon itself is being split into two different types to accommodate a world that demands both massive context and instantaneous reasoning.

Why inference is breaking the GPU architecture in two

To understand why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dropped one-third of his reported $60 billion cash pile on a licensing deal, you have to look at the existential threats converging on his ...