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Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

699 points by nickrubin 9mo ago

https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusive-inference-technology-licensing-agreement-to-accelerate-ai-inference-at-global-scale https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv...

julienfr112 9mo ago
How can this pass antitrust régulation ?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  I doubt Nvidia will be regulated in their home jurisdiction. America tends to protect it's cash cows, for better or worse.
- rvz 9mo ago
  There is no "antitrust regulation" in the US in 2025. (Until 2029) States are "not allowed" to regulate AI companies.
  - ronyfadel 9mo ago
    Care to give more details?
    - rvz 9mo ago
      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmddnge9yro https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmddnge9yro
    - irl_zebra 9mo ago
      I don't know specifically, but I think they're referring to the current USA administration's posture of approving anything, or pardoning anyone, in exchange for some cryptocurrency or similar big favour.
  - sunaookami 9mo ago
    There also weren't any antitrust regulations before, let's not kid ourselves.
    - calmbell 9mo ago
      There was an attempt under Lina Khan.
    - kergonath 9mo ago
      The regulations are still in place. They are not enforced, however.
- agency 9mo ago
  > Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.
  - bonesss 9mo ago
    They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm…
    - quesera 9mo ago
      That's the thing though -- no one made Jimmy Carter sell his farm[0]. But Jimmy Carter was an honorable human, and, well...there are fewer people fitting that description sitting behind the Resolute desk, today. [0] He didn't sell it, he put it into a blind trust. He should have sold it. When he left office, the farm was $1MM in debt.
MuffinFlavored 9mo ago
Is any part of this because Google has the TPU and Groq has the LPU?
- wmf 9mo ago
  There's definitely a narrative that ASICs/TPUs/LPUs are more efficient than GPUs and thus Nvidia "needs" an ASIC. Whether this is true is debated.
rvz 9mo ago
Great choice and what a great deal. Quite obvious that Groq would get acquired. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438820
scratchyone 9mo ago
Uh oh, not good that a major Nvidia competitor with genuine alternative technology will no longer be competing... Chances this tech gets killed post-acquisition?
- pohl 9mo ago
  Zero. Non-zero only if someone says something deemed “woke”.
- wmf 9mo ago
  It may be more likely that Nvidia sells the LPUv2 at a price that doesn't threaten Rubin.
throwup238 9mo ago
> Groq is expected to alert its investors about the deal later on Wednesday. While the acquisition includes all of Groq’s assets, its nascent Groq cloud business is not part of the transaction, said Davis. Wait, what? How is the cloud business supposed to run if Nvidia is acquiring the rights to the hardware?
- ChristianJacobs 9mo ago
  That's the neat trick - it isn't...
  - garyfirestorm 9mo ago
    Sell the asset and then lease it from the buyer.
    - throwup238 9mo ago
      That works fine with office buildings and stuff where a company is redistributing its risk profile, but not when the company it’s selling to has every incentive to kill the asset as a competitor.
- onion2k 9mo ago
  It isn't, and the other companies that offer cloud AI that Nvidia has invested in can carry on happy they have one less competitor. This is how business works in the 21st century - once one company has a dominant position and a massive warchest they can just buy any business that has any potential of disrupting their revenue. It's literally the thesis Peter Thiel sets out in Zero To One. It works really well for that one business.
- fancyfredbot 9mo ago
  From the press release, Nvidia now has a non exclusive license to the hardware. Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer. GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
- 9mo ago
kreyenborgi 9mo ago
There was an AMA here last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39429047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39429047
asdev 9mo ago
[flagged]
- yellow_lead 9mo ago
  He is good at scamming others
- erichocean 9mo ago
  nVidia is being scammed here? Seems unlikely…
  - superkuh 9mo ago
    For nvidia increasing the numbers of their money-multiplying mutual investment ring is more important than the value of the deals. It's about involving more capital and people and making their grift too big to fail and keeping the stock numbers up. Nvidia has the ability to promise large amounts of money like this in announcements but I haven't read about any of them actually having money or good exchange hands yet.
behnamoh 9mo ago
I just stopped my Groq API. Sad to see competition being eaten up by shitty Nvidia. I like their products but Jensen is an absolute mfer with deceitful marketing.
- archerx 9mo ago
  I literally said “oh no” out loud when I read the headline.
- moneywoes 9mo ago
  was the API good
  - behnamoh 9mo ago
    fast but furiously expensive
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      Honestly cerebras is good. I can recommend it. I talked to their team once on discord as a literal free user so that was something really nice personally They were also the faster one compared to groq but they were always a little slow on adding new models compared to groq but not sure what changed right now. Definitely recommend cerebras tho now that groq's been eaten up from inside basically
      - highmastdon 9mo ago
        I had the feeling that Cerebras only supports smaller modes. Maybe something to do with their hardware arch? I never dove into it. I wanted to use Kimi K2 fast for coding and Groq was the only fast provider at the time
        kroaton 9mo ago
        Cerebras currently has GLM4.6 on it, and will be getting GLM4.7 soon.
DebtDeflation 9mo ago
Hopefully they plan to invest in the technology and not just eliminate a competitor.
- mdasen 9mo ago
  They almost certainly plan to invest in the technology. One of the biggest threats to Nvidia is people developing AI-centric ASICs before they get there. Yes, Google has their TPUs and there are others around, but it's early on. In some ways, it's not about eliminating a competitor. It's about eliminating all the competitors. Nvidia can use its resources to push AI ASICs farther faster than others, potentially cutting off a whole host of competitors that threaten their business. Nvidia has the hardware and software talent, the money, and the market position to give their AI ASICs an advantage. They know if they don't lean into ASICs that someone else will and their gravy train will end. So they almost certainly won't be abandoning the technology. But that doesn't mean that it'll be good for us.
syntaxing 9mo ago
I don’t see how this isn’t anti trust but knowing this political climate, this deal will go through.
- mastax 9mo ago
  https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidias-huang-joins-tech-titans-funding-trumps-ballroom-2025-10-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidias-huang-joins-tech-ti...
  - exasperaited 9mo ago
    Good of them to make a list themselves, isn't it? It'll be useful in the future.
    - bdangubic 9mo ago
      as useful as it was before this administration when big tech was sucking up to whomever was running the country (e.g. “macho man” Zuck was getting ready to tattoo DEI on his forehead couple of years ago) or just now it’ll be magically useful?
      - exasperaited 9mo ago
        You miss my point. This is a list of people engaging in something flat-out corrupt. The ballroom is an inherently corrupt project. It will prove to be simple corruption.
        bdangubic 9mo ago
        whats the punishment for corruption (especially when you have 100’s of billions of dollars) I wonder…
        mrbungie 9mo ago
        Why is that relevant if there is no one willing to prosecute and convict?
niemandhier 9mo ago
I could not figure out if „cash“ means literally cash or figuratively cash in the sense of “no trade in shares”. Will there be a truck full of paper money or not?
- adam_arthur 9mo ago
  Implies they will pay cash value to equity holders as opposed to issuing NVDA shares. (Electronically)
  - SecretDreams 9mo ago
    Is this to somehow screw the employees with RSUs or what?
    - wmf 9mo ago
      No, it doesn't really matter if they pay in cash or stock. If you think NVDA has room to run you're welcome to use your buyout money to buy NVDA on the open market.
      - SecretDreams 9mo ago
        Well, this isn't framed as a buyout/takeover, so I was curious how existing RSUs would be cashed out? This deal is framed as IP transfer and talent transfer without owning the full company. Probably to skirt anti trust, among other things.
        adam_arthur 9mo ago
        I'm not sure in this specific case. They could choose to pay the employees some portion of the funds. If not, the owners are likely liable to be sued for "selling in effect" without paying equity holders. Presuming the company becomes a defacto subsidiary of Nvidia (even if not legally so) My guess, without researching it, is they will compensate existing equity holders to avoid that possibility. I mean the valuation multiple is enormous, it's worth it simply to derisk the legal aspect.
Caius-Cosades 9mo ago
Nvidia. Please stop. Just stop it already.
nextworddev 9mo ago
They should have bought nbis
maz1b 9mo ago
Damn. Was hoping Groq and Cerebras would give the giants a run for their money.
- piskov 9mo ago
  There is still Modular
  - jampekka 9mo ago
    And China.
    - jimnotgym 9mo ago
      It would be interesting if it turned out that Chinese competition was the only thing that kept this market working!
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        I imagine 2 big giants basically (Nvidia/google/amd basically influenced by a few select of people) vs (Chinese companies who have investments from the govt) its sort of like proxy wars and this is sort of whats happening in software side of things with open source models but I think that the benefit of the proxy wars is going to be for the end consumers But although on the other hand, having two large countries compete with each other while buying everything else and all feels like it astronomically increases the price if someone wants to compete with these two giants (any other country perhaps) We definitely need a better system where it doesn't feel like we are seeing pacman eat everything up basically
        SecretDreams 9mo ago
        > Nvidia/google/amd One of these things is not like the others
      - wyre 9mo ago
        Is it not? All this money is going into AI under the fear that China will win the race to AGI. China releases open-source models that keep OpenAI/Anthropic researching and training their models, which in turn creates demand for more Nvidia GPUs.
erichocean 9mo ago
Well that sucks.
nusl 9mo ago
Legit feels like Nvidia just buying out competition to maintain their position and power in the industry. I sincerely hope they fall flat on their face.
- A_D_E_P_T 9mo ago
  > Legit feels like Nvidia just buying out competition to maintain their position and power Well, I mean, isn't that exactly what they should be doing? (I'm not talking about whether or not it benefits society; this is more along the lines of how they're incentivized.) Put yourself in their shoes. If you had all that cash, and you're hearing people talk of an "AI Bubble" on a daily basis, and you want to try and ensure that you ride the wave without ever crashing... the only rational thing to do is use the money to try and cover all your bases. This means buying competitors and it also means diversifying a little bit.
  - BoredPositron 9mo ago
    Dunno thought AGI would make everything obsolete and it's just around the corner? It looks rather like it dawns on everyone that transformers won't bring salvation. It's a show of weakness.
  - zapnuk 9mo ago
    No one is claiming that it's a bad move. It's just an anti-competitive move that could be very bad for the consumer as it makes the inference market less competitive.
  - fatata123 9mo ago
    [dead]
- piskov 9mo ago
  Stuff like tinygrad will change this. Geohot already made nvidia run on macs via thunderbolt. Also: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983469817895198783 https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983469817895198783
nickysielicki 9mo ago
Groq press release: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusive-inference-technology-licensing-agreement-to-accelerate-ai-inference-at-global-scale https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv... > Today, Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology. The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference. > As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology. > Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer. > GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
- justincormack 9mo ago
  So it is not structured as an acquisition to avoid anti trust but effectively it probably is.
  - whatsupdog 9mo ago
    Yes I'm sure that "non exclusive" partnership is exactly that, wink wink!
  - DivingForGold 9mo ago
    Indeed, as justincormack comments: ”It is not structured as an outright acquisition to avoid US Gov't anti trust scrutiny, but effectively it probably is”. “Non-exclusive” ? Ummmm, yeah, right, sure. You can probably bet there is an private understanding that Groq will no longer offer it's “top of the line” best technology to competitors of Nvidia. Some may see this as a clever, “slight of the hand” attempt for Nvidia to maintain it's perceived dominance & lead in GPU-TPU development. “Non-exclusive” does not in any form or fashion spell out that all Nvidia's competitors can and will obtain the very top, cutting edge Groq technology as Nvidia will obtain . . .
    - biggc 9mo ago
      What generated this comment?
fancyfredbot 9mo ago
The price is 40x their target revenue. That's twice the price to revenue multiplier applied to Anthropic in their most recent funding round, and really really hard to portray as a good deal. I don't think it really helps Nvidia's competitive position. The serious competition to Nvidia is coming from Google's TPU, Amazon's Trainium, AMD's Instinct, and to a much lesser extent Intel's ARC. Grow recent investors got back a 3x multiple and may now invest in one of Nvidia's other competitors instead.
- la64710 9mo ago
  Also Tsavorite scalable intelligence - their architecture seems to cover the broadest use cases and compatible with cuda
  - _zoltan_ 9mo ago
    is this an ad? do you work there? I'm following the chip industry on a daily basis and never heard of them...
- arisAlexis 9mo ago
  And Cerebras
  - YouAreWRONGtoo 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- bri3d 9mo ago
  The only thing I can think of here is that OpenAI’s DRAM land grab is going to stack on a non-NV target and NV need to hedge with an SRAM design that’s on the market NOW. Otherwise, I can’t see how NV couldn’t eat Groq’s lunch in one development cycle - it’s not like NV can’t attach a TPU to some SRAM and an interconnect. Either that or Groq closed a deep enough book to scare them, but 40x is a lot of scared.
thehamkercat 9mo ago
Next they would acquire and kill Cerebras. I hate every part of Nvidia
roughly 9mo ago
The absolute best case I can make for this: I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that Nvidia’s architecture has reached scaling limits - the power demands of their latest chips has Microsoft investing in nuclear fusion. Similar to Intel in both the pre-Core days and their more recent chips, they need an actual new architecture to move forward. As sits, there’s no path to profitability for the buyers of these chips given the cost and capabilities of the current LLM architectures, and this is obvious enough that even Nvidia has to realize it’s existential for them. If Groq’s architecture can actually change the economics of inference and training sufficient to bring the costs in line with the actual, not speculative, benefits of LLMs, this may not be a buy-and-kill for Nvidia but something closer to Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi, which made the A- and M- class chips possible. (Mind you, in Intel’s case they had to have their clocks cleaned by AMD a couple times to get them to see, but I think we’re further past the point of diminishing returns with Nvidia - I think they’re far enough past when the economics turned against them that Reality is their competition now.)
- jvanderbot 9mo ago
  NVIDIA and "no path to profitability" don't belong in the same zip code.
  - jonah 9mo ago
    I read it as path to profitability for the AI companies buying Nvidia's chips.
  - roughly 9mo ago
    No path to profitability for the people using their products for their putative purpose, which seems like it might affect Nvidia’s bottom line at some point. Clarified.
- wmf 9mo ago
  there’s no path to profitability for the buyers of these chips given the cost and capabilities of the current LLM architectures Didn't Anthropic say inference is already profitable?
yoan9224 9mo ago
this is genuinely sad, groq had really fast inference and was a legit alternative architecture to nvidia's dominance. feels like we're watching consolidation kill innovation in real time. really hoping regulators actually look at this one but not holding my breath
exceptione 9mo ago
Following the age old playbook of monopolies. https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-america-the-cult-of-wealth-1-3/ https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame... (Use a vpn if outside EUR) A free market is a regulated market. Otherwise you will end up with monopolies and a dead market.
- incrudible 9mo ago
  …except they are a rather small hardware startup, there is a dozen other rather small hardware startups they did not buy, and there will be more such startups funded just on the news that NVIDIA bought one at a big premium.
  - exceptione 9mo ago
    I understand your line of reasoning, but the net effect is that any competition will be eliminated. Those startups that are not posing a real threat don't count anyways. Hardware startups are not easy. If the effect is that the most likely way to make money is to be bought by the behemoth, then this distorts the market even more and suffocates innovation.
asdfsfds 9mo ago
That's great, but LLMs are still not generating revenue.
- latchkey 9mo ago
  They are generating revenue, profit is the dubious thing.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- SonOfKyuss 9mo ago
  They’re generating tons of revenue, just not necessarily profits
- irl_zebra 9mo ago
  I pay $20/mo for Gemini, so they're generating at least that much in revenue!
  - SecretDreams 9mo ago
    All depends on how much it costs them to service your $20/month sub in OPEX and how much it cost them in capex to buy and maintain that hardware.
nowittyusername 9mo ago
This is the most blatant buy the competition move if i've ever seen one....
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
dwa3592 9mo ago
This doesn't make much sense- In September, Groq was valued at $7B. How is it that in 4 months it is being bought for $20B? Can someone with better understanding dumb this down for me please?
- ZiiS 9mo ago
  It only has to be overvalued by a lower multiple then NVidia; not undervalued.
- wmf 9mo ago
  Imagine a pharma with a weight loss drug that isn't approved yet; it's either worth $20B (if approved) or zero (if not approved). Now imagine the LPUv2 ASIC. If it works it's worth $20B and if it doesn't it's zero. If investors think LPUv2 has a 1/3 chance of success they would buy in at $7B. Then the chip boots up and... look at that. Or it's just a massive bubble.
  - moneywoes 9mo ago
    eli5 lpu please
    - ra7 9mo ago
      Groq calls their inference chips “Language Processing Unit”: https://groq.com/blog/the-groq-lpu-explained https://groq.com/blog/the-groq-lpu-explained
- dandanua 9mo ago
  It's an AI blackhole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21e5GZF3yx0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21e5GZF3yx0
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    I got recommended this and I will watch it today, thank you. One of the comments points out "They’ve literally told us that the plan is to get bailed out by the taxpayers" This reminded me of how I think what's gonna happen/ is already happening is that they become too big to fail and get bailed out and the burden/loss becomes of taxpayers So we are kind of living in a system which is reckless about finances/stability behind businesses where the system is such that all the profits are privatized but all the losses are shared/even funded by the average person Combine in a mix of corruption in any political party to begin with and I am wondering why we don't have yet another french revolution.
NaOH 9mo ago
Related on the business side, and from the last two years: AI Chip Startup Groq Raises $750M at $6.9B Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276985 - Sept 2025 (5 comments) Groq Raises $640M to Meet Soaring Demand for Fast AI Inference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162875 - Aug 2024 (34 comments) AI chip startup Groq lands $640M to challenge Nvidia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162463 - Aug 2024 (12 comments) Groq CEO: 'We No Longer Sell Hardware' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964590 - April 2024 (149 comments)
- iamacyborg 9mo ago
  From $6.9b to 20 in a few months, not bad…
  - koakuma-chan 9mo ago
    Almost as good as forking VSCode, impressive.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      That was impressive to see what you did there and the harsh reality that its true hits like a brick. Don't forget that those forks of VScode are gonna be bought by Nvidia or chatgpt (OpenAI which gets invested by Nvidia) and everything else Its all one large web connecting every investment and cross-investments and everything. The bubble image which got infamous recently is definitely popping up even more. Its crazy basically.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    Acquisitions generally come in at a significantly higher price. Even in public markets, acquiring all the shares of a company will require an offer that is a significant step above the current trading price.
siliconc0w 9mo ago
Maybe the EU or individual states will sue under their own anti-trust laws will stop this - seems pretty clearly anti-competitive and probably a prelude of these over-valued companies using their stock to gobble up any possible competitor to consolidate even more.
altpaddle 9mo ago
I do not understand this move by Nvidia, they are afraid of being out competed by this startup in their core competence of building chips for AI? They may be eliminating a competitor for now but this move will immediately many more AI chip startups to get founded
- sthuck 9mo ago
  groq is a series E hardware startup founded in 2016. It took them this long to be a potential threat, I'm not sure they are even an actual threat. Even if this purchase causes 100 new hardware startups to be funded tomorrow, nVidia is perfectly fine with that. Let's see how many survive 5 years down the line
- reissbaker 9mo ago
  They're not eliminating a competitor, they're (effectively) acquiring a competitor. Nvidia's GPUs are great for training, and not bad for inference, but the custom chips are better for inference and Nvidia's worried about losing customers. Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now.
  - blitzar 9mo ago
    > Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now. For $0bn they could have sold an Nvidia-like chip for inference.
- baq 9mo ago
  the play is 10x faster inference leads to 100x demand give or take, which isn't a bad assumption at all if you ask me. the problem is actually fitting a good model onto hardware that fast.
why-o-why 9mo ago
Can't wait for the abuse of the word Grok to die (bet none of these techbros even read the book). There was even an AI company that made a product called "Sophon". Talk about an overinflated sense of self-worth. I like the Wright Brothers, they called the first plain, "Flyer".
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
andrewinardeer 9mo ago
Headline is incorrect. NVIDIA isn't buying Groq. It's a non exclusive deal for inference tech. Or am I reading it incorrectly?
- hmate9 9mo ago
  There is also movement over of some key people to nvidia which is pretty significant: "As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology."
  - lerchmo 9mo ago
    curious how the execs can honor the fiduciary duty to share holders assuming only they? get the 20 billion and the company is left headless and leaking all of its intellectual property to Nvidia?
    - wmf 9mo ago
      Shareholders get the $20B so that's the fiduciary responsibility fully satisfied.
- davedunkin 9mo ago
  Non-exclusive licensing and hiring the team. > As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology.
impulser_ 9mo ago
Are they buying them to try and slow down open source models and protect the massive amounts of money they make from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta ect? It quite obvious that open source models are catching up to closed source models very fast they about 3-4 months behind right now, and yeah they are trained on Nvidia chips, but as the open source models become more usable, and closer to closed source models they will eat into Nvidia profit as these companies aren't spending tens of billion dollars on chips to train and run inference. These are smaller models trained on fewer GPUs and they are performing as good as the pervious OpenAI and Anthropic models. So obviously open source models are a direct threat to Nvidia, and they only thing open source models struggle at is scaling inference and this is where Groq and Cerberus come into the picture as they provide the fastest inference for open source models that make them even more usable than SOTA models. Maybe I'm way off on this.
- matthewfcarlson 9mo ago
  Idk- cheaper inference seems to be a huge industry secret and providing the best inference tech that only works with nvidia seems like a good plan. Makes nvidia the absolute king of compute against AWS/AMD/Intel seems like a no brainer.
- SkyPuncher 9mo ago
  They need to vertically integrate the entire stack or they die. All of the big players are already making plans for their own chips/hardware. They see everyone else competing for the exact same vendor’s chips and need to diversify.
- Workaccount2 9mo ago
  Shy of an algo breakthrough, open source isn't going to catch up with SOTA, their main trick for model improvement is distilling the SOTA models. That's why they they have perpetually been "right behind".
  - impulser_ 9mo ago
    They don't need to catch up. They just need to be good enough and fast as fuck. Vast majority of useful tasks of LLMs has nothing to do with how smart they are. GPT-5 models have been the most useless models out of any model released this year despite being SOTA, and it because it slow as fuck.
moneywoes 9mo ago
is this in response to the threat from Google tpu
brcmthrowaway 9mo ago
What are the other top AI silicon vendors? Graphcore Tenstorrent SambaNova Rivos
- chermanowicz 9mo ago
  the talk is that sambanova-intel is akin to a firesale, so who knows what the real story with any single company. same with graphcore. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/sambanova-exploring-sale-after-struggling-to-secure-further-funding-report/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/sambanova-explori...
xvector 9mo ago
Put Groq and Nvidia execs in prison, blatant anti-trust.
anonzzzies 9mo ago
I do not consider this good news; I had hopes Anthropic or so would buy them, not the main AI hardware people.
nntwozz 9mo ago
I remember when Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock. Media said it was crazy back then, well I think this sounds a lot crazier but hindsight is 20/20.
- anonzzzies 9mo ago
  I thought the Skype deal back then was worse: it sucked balls back then already.
- twoodfin 9mo ago
  And now we’re told that bet was such a sure thing that regulators should have blocked it!
yousif_123123 9mo ago
Not good. This shouldn't be allowed. What would be better is if groq and cerebras combined, and maybe other companies invested in them to help them scale. Why would the major cloud providers not lobby against this? Usually antitrust is for consumers, but here I think companies like Microsoft and AWS would be the biggest beneficiaries of having more AI chip competition.
- aurareturn 9mo ago
  Groq is absolutely tiny. I don't think antitrust is an issue here.
  - jeromegv 9mo ago
    20 billions is tiny?
    - aurareturn 9mo ago
      That's the sales price of the company. Their marketshare, I imagine, is absolutely miniscule.
    - neilellis 9mo ago
      Is nowadays
    - derwiki 9mo ago
      WhatsApp was a tiny team
    - ignoramous 9mo ago
      Market share wise, Groq is perhaps "tiny"? Nvidia may be paying a premium for Groq [0] since it eliminates competition (at least on the inference side). [0] valued ~£6.5bn 2mo ago https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valuation-69-billion-investors-bet-ai-chips-2025-09-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valu...
- nabla9 9mo ago
monster_truck 9mo ago
groq was targeting a part of the stack where cuda was weakest: guaranteed inference time at a lower cost per token at scale. This was in response to more than just goog's tpus, they were also one of the few realistic alternative paths oai had with those wafers.
Daviey 9mo ago
I got curious about how many wheelbarrows of cash $20bn actually is. Two ways to think about it: weight vs volume. By weight (assuming all $100 bills): $20,000,000,000 / $100 = 200,000,000 bills Each bill is roughly 1g, so total mass is ~200,000 kg A typical builder’s wheelbarrow can take about 100 kg before it becomes unmanageable 200,000 kg total / 100 kg per wheelbarrow ≈ 2,000 wheelbarrows (weight limit) By volume: A $100 bill is ~6.14" × 2.61" × 0.11 mm, which comes out to about 102 cm³ per bill 200,000,000 bills × 102 cm³ ≈ 20,400 m³ of cash A standard wheelbarrow holds around 0.08 m³ (80 litres) 20,400 m³ total / 0.08 m³ per wheelbarrow ≈ 255,000 wheelbarrows (volume limit) So, About 2,000 wheelbarrows if you only care about weight About 255,000 wheelbarrows if you actually have to fit the cash in So the limiting factor isn’t how heavy the money is; it’s that the physical volume of the cash is absurd. At this scale, $20bn in $100s is effectively a warehouse, not a stack.
- ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
  Your volume of a single bill is a bit off.
- SauntSolaire 9mo ago
  Something wrong about representing the weight of US dollars in metric units.
  - versteegen 9mo ago
    Then what do you say to 6.14" × 2.61" × 0.11 mm = 102 cm³
  - zaik 9mo ago
    They should have converted to Euros first.
  - blitzar 9mo ago
    How many pounds is it? Whos on first?
  - mr_toad 9mo ago
    > Something wrong about representing the weight of US dollars in metric units. The traditional unit of measure of truckloads of money is (drum roll) a dump truck. A large dump truck holds 16-20 cubic yards. https://www.catdumptruck.com/standard-dump-truck-size-chart/ https://www.catdumptruck.com/standard-dump-truck-size-chart/
moralestapia 9mo ago
"2.7M Developers and Teams" So, about ~$1,000/each? Seems pricey, even assuming all of them still use it every week/month.
skeptrune 9mo ago
I hope non executives and founders get something for their equity.
boroboro4 9mo ago
From the comment below: > Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. Makes it very hard not to think of this as a way to give money to the current administration. I know, this sounds conspiracy theory grade, but 20b is too much for groq.
- laidoffamazon 9mo ago
  It's not a conspiracy theory. It's basically a bribe to Chamath, Don Jr. and Sacks.
- slrainka 9mo ago
  The value of Groq comes from its excellent price-to-performance ratio. Its inferencing speeds are faster than those of H200s, and it has the lowest costs in the industry. When running similar batch jobs across different providers compared to Groq, the processing speed can sometimes be more than 10 times faster. These figures are important for developing practical applications for production use. It's common for me to run workloads in Groq that cost less than $100, while the same workload can approach $1,000 on Bedrock or Gemini. They have tuned a set of OS models that can now deliver a full application. The speeds have allowed me to offload a lot of the functionality from heuristics to straight-up LLMs.
jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
Will be interesting technically to see what develops from this. NVLink? Full CUDA feels maybe doubtful but who knows. Nvidia CUDA Tile feels like more of a maybe, their new much more explicit way of making workloads. This does feel a bit sad for sure, worrying whether this might hold Groq and innovation back. Reciprocally, perhaps kind of cool to see Groq get a massive funding boost and help from a very experienced chip making peer. It feels like an envious position somewhat, even with the long term consequences being so hazy. From the outside yes it looks like Nvidia solidifying their iron grasp over a market with very limited competitive suppliers, but this could help Groq, and maybe it's not on the terms we think we want right now, but could be very cool to see. I really hope some of the rest of the markets can see what's happening, broadly, with Nvidia forming partnerships all over the place. NVLink with Intel, NVLink with Amazon's Tritanium... there's much more to the ecosystem, but just connecting the chips smartly is a huge task, is core to inter-operation. And for all we've heard of CXL, UltraAccelerator Link (UALink) and UltraEthernet (UET) it feels like very few major players are taking it seriously enough to just integrate these new interconnects & make them awesome. They remain incredible expensive & not commonly used, lacking broad industry adoption, and reserved for very expensive systems: there's a huge existential risk here that (lack of) interconnect will destroy competitors ability to get their good chips well integrated and used. The rest of the market needs more clear alarm bells going off, and needs to be making sure good interconnect is available on way more chips, get it into everyone's hands ASAP not just big customers, so that adoption & Linux nerd type folks can start building stacks that open up the future. The market risks getting left behind, if NVLink is built in everywhere and the various other fabrics never become common-place.
pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
> Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer. Kindof feel bad for Simon Edwards, lol. I wonder what the plan is for the future of Groq
- cavisne 9mo ago
  I would assume this is a very well paid position, and with basically nothing to do.
  - lerchmo 9mo ago
    I would assume he is a fiduciary... I am curious what happens with investors here?
    - porridgeraisin 9mo ago
      Probably nvidia will keep investing in random rounds groq will continue to raise.
- htrp 9mo ago
  He has to keep the company in business for 2 more years
  - pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
    Are there consequences if he fails to do so?
nl 9mo ago
Given that Groq is basically the TPU spin out Google should have done years ago it shows what a valuable asset TPUs are in Google. Still this they should spin that out though!
- shwaj 9mo ago
  Groq is very different from TPUs. The difference in memory should be a big clue. (Groq using SRAM built into each compute unit, vs TPUs using HBM more similarly to GPUs)
  - nl 9mo ago
    The founder created TPUs at Google. > Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan began what became Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first generation TPU chip.
    - shwaj 9mo ago
      I know, so what? Very smart people might have more than one idea in their careers. He left to pursue one of those.
    - FL33TW00D 9mo ago
      He did not "create" the TPU. He contributed to the creation of the TPU. There are 66 authors on the original TPU paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079856.3080246 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079856.3080246
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
I believe that this news kind of helps cerebras as groq and cerebras are the only two companies working extensively in this space I feel as if Nvidia is eating up even companies which I thought had genuine potential or anything related to AI industry whether profitable or not Nvidia's trying its best to take all major players and consolidate into one big entity from top to bottom. The problem with this approach imo is that long term, nvidia's stock is extremely overvalued and its still a bubble which will burst and it will take nvidia first and foremost. The issue is that when nvidia falls, it will take the whole literal industry from top to bottom, even those companies which I thought could survive an AI burst. Long term I feel like it will have really bad impacts if nvidia continues to gobble up every company. I am pretty sure that Nvidia might be looking at cerebras too and if they offer them a shit ton of money and cerebras gets bought. I genuinely believe that Nvidia has sort of invested in literally all pockets of any hardware related investment for AI. And when OpenAI is unable to pay Nvidia, I feel like it can all come crashing down since this whole cycle is only being possible via external investor money.
ilaksh 9mo ago
The last time I tested, I could swear they were doing some problematic quantization, because I was getting kind of random results with one or two models, which worked perfectly when I switched providers. It was really disappointing too because Cerebras does not provide any service reliability on their cheap plans. So I came to the conclusion that unless I could convince the client to set up an enterprise contract or something, we could not use either provider for low-latency, which we need for voice calls. I think for organizations that can afford a hefty contract that guarantees service levels, Groq and Cerebras especially are basically cheat codes for meeting latency requirements for voice. But that might not be an option for really small businesses.. although maybe I am just not a good sales person.
sanxiyn 9mo ago
In my opinion, Groq's technical decisions are unsound in a normal world. But being HBM-free may have some merit in a world where HBM supply is constrained.
almosthere 9mo ago
Hopefully prices stay the same, I run my small apps on groq. I get good enough summarization and simple agents from gpt120b which is on 15 cents for a million input tks.
- indigodaddy 9mo ago
  Can you list any internet facing apps you have that use Groq? Looking into them myself because of the speed
  - almosthere 9mo ago
    Still in development, but yes, the speed is absolutely nice.
mattas 9mo ago
Biggest surprise for me is that they chose to announce this on Christmas Eve. I’d love to have been in the room when that was decided. The big, exciting news doesn’t typically get announced during a major holiday week.
- bgwalter 9mo ago
  They want the Trump Jr. and Chamath connections to be forgotten by the time the media and YouTubers get active again after New Year. It's a standard media tactic.
  - dustbunny 9mo ago
    What's your angle on the Chamath link? Is Nvidia greasing Sack's favour through Chamath?
  - tokioyoyo 9mo ago
    Honestly, it's basically an accepted fact that the best thing to do is just to never respond anything that media/people say. If you respond, the conversation will continue. If you just say nothing, they'll move on to the next topic, because everyone needs to keep their audience engaged. With no response, your audience isn't interested either, so you have to move onto something else.
    - cindyllm 9mo ago
      [dead]
richardw 9mo ago
This is smart as hell. I’ve long wondered how they’d combat ASIC’s without diluting their own benefits. This gives them a bit more time to figure out the moats, which is useful because Groq was going places. This juices Groq’s distribution, production, ability to access a wider range of skills where necessary. I expect China to want to compete with this. Simpler than full-blown Nvidia chips. Cue much cheaper and faster inference for all.
dustbunny 9mo ago
Congratulations to Chamath
- 7e 9mo ago
  For failing?
kennethologist 9mo ago
Big win for Chamath!
justinai6 9mo ago
A few thoughts: [disclaimer - I don't know anything official at all just reading the same public info that has been officially shared - this is just a few thoughts from an outsider] - The deal structure matters, and we don't have enough details yet. - If the license fee is distributed to shareholders, it goes above the liquidation preference. Anyone with common stock or options can exercise and get paid out. - The company continuing forward—I see this as great. There are discussions about it becoming just a shell, but I don't think that's the case at all. This looks like an acqui-hire for a few top people and a licensing deal for an alternative hardware approach to inference. Let's say they keep $3–4B cash in the company. That's plenty to avoid another financing round and keep cranking on growth. Groq and Cerebras can keep adding speed to open models while giving Nvidia key IP they can integrate into their large data center buildouts. Also, on deal points I think could be interesting: would you negotiate this as a one-time payment license deal? I wouldn't. Maybe it's a hurdle, so it might take a while, but let's say Nvidia pushes massive investment to deploy this Groq hardware infrastructure integrated into their full stack… A. This could produce a nice royalty stream for the Groq company that still exists—benefiting all stakeholders. B. Use Nvidia's massive ability to deploy capital and hardware pipeline and add in another unit they can sell to their fat stakes customers and ultimately to cheapen and accelerate getting fast inference in the wild quickly. And lastly, if management is smart or clever with the distribution part of this deal, maybe they convert all stock to common and squash the liquidation preference in this move. so they might have a quite compelling cap table post deal. (again hopefully structured as a distribution vs buy out) but at least pref is gone. So employees exercise, get an exit, keep their stock—with investors already happy, liquidation preference gone, and potentially a well-capitalized future royalty stream coming from the largest market cap company in the world and the largest capex pipeline ever seen. I'd much rather own the actual shares (fewer handcuffs) and have plenty of cash to deploy in a very capex-heavy moment. It just seems like a win-win-win-win. Nvidia wins new fundamentally different IP can sell to there existing customers Groq employees and stakeholders win. The open models win (big). We as AI consumers win because of cheaper, faster inference. Common to what we all want to believe here, we’re not really in a winner take all moment here. nvdia is just taking a disproportional amount because of lack of real suitable alternatives… The base will for sure widen and expand from where we are at now, but that doesn’t mean that nvidia has to or is going or loose as part of it.
supermatt 9mo ago
Is there less regulatory oversight when purchasing assets instead of the company? The near exclusive global provider of AI chips purchasing the only serious competitors technology while quite spceficially describing it as “not an acquisition” seems a bit…
supermatt 9mo ago
Is there less regulatory oversight when purchasing assets instead of the company, or do Nvidia really believe the FTC/DOJ are that blind? (Or doesn’t it matter in the current climate?) The near exclusive global provider of AI chips taking key employees from and “licensing” the technology of the only serious competitor while quite specifically describing it as “not acquiring Groq as a company” seems quite obviously anti-competitive, and quite clearly an attempt to frame it as not.
- mrdevlar 9mo ago
  American has not had functional anti-trust laws for the better part of the last 40 years. The current climate is just a peak.
joelthelion 9mo ago
What a disaster. Any little competition they have, they are going to buy out. The world needs much stronger anti trust laws.
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  the world needs ENFORCEMENT of existing ones. Laws don't help if government is complicit in the grift because AI is only thing propping up the GDP
wetpaws 9mo ago
[dead]
z3ratul163071 9mo ago
chamath made a killing
fyrn_ 9mo ago
Seems anticompetitive..
Sayyidalijufri 9mo ago
Someone say to me that Nvidia is not buying Groq; the deal is a non-exclusive licensing agreement for its inference technology with some team members joining Nvidia. and he gave me this link: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusive-inference-technology-licensing-agreement-to-accelerate-ai-inference-at-global-scale https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startup-groq-for-about-20-billion-biggest-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...
- woadwarrior01 9mo ago
  Indeed, it seems to be an Inflection-AI[1] style acquihire of senior leadership and not an acquisition. MS also entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with what was left of Inflection AI after poaching its founders. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_AI
ryzvonusef 9mo ago
people on twitter are calling it yet another acqui-hire.
kodefreeze 9mo ago
They raised at a ~6B round recently. I could have invested but missed the deadline :(
gigatexal 9mo ago
If we had a functioning government this wouldn’t be legal
mlazos 9mo ago
This is the absolute biggest grift of the century by the groq team. They never shared actual TCO, and I remember a Seminalaysis article about the power consumption being actually insane - this makes sense because they scale the number of chips to fit a single model when they have no dram. They have good inference latency but there was no way the economics were going to work out. Meanwhile Nvidia with every advantage in the world decides they’re worth 20B? It actually doesn’t make sense at all. The only scenarios the groq system would be worth it is in the exact throughput-optimized scenarios Nvidia already thrives in.
rldjbpin 9mo ago
my prediction is that nvidia will release inference-optimized hardware in the future release cycles. these chips might have a hard time to trickle down to lower-tier, but money printer go brrr.
alcomatt 9mo ago
"A Great Argument" for Capitalism and "competition" being the drive of innovation... also shows how antimonopoly regulations are just ink-on-pages and zero real-world applicability...

699 points by nickrubin 9mo ago

julienfr112 9mo ago

How can this pass antitrust régulation ?

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
bigyabai 9mo ago
I doubt Nvidia will be regulated in their home jurisdiction. America tends to protect it's cash cows, for better or worse.
rvz 9mo ago
There is no "antitrust regulation" in the US in 2025. (Until 2029) States are "not allowed" to regulate AI companies.
- ronyfadel 9mo ago
  Care to give more details?
  - rvz 9mo ago
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmddnge9yro https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmddnge9yro
  - irl_zebra 9mo ago
    I don't know specifically, but I think they're referring to the current USA administration's posture of approving anything, or pardoning anyone, in exchange for some cryptocurrency or similar big favour.
- sunaookami 9mo ago
  There also weren't any antitrust regulations before, let's not kid ourselves.
  - calmbell 9mo ago
    There was an attempt under Lina Khan.
  - kergonath 9mo ago
    The regulations are still in place. They are not enforced, however.
agency 9mo ago
> Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.
- bonesss 9mo ago
  They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm…
  - quesera 9mo ago
    That's the thing though -- no one made Jimmy Carter sell his farm[0]. But Jimmy Carter was an honorable human, and, well...there are fewer people fitting that description sitting behind the Resolute desk, today. [0] He didn't sell it, he put it into a blind trust. He should have sold it. When he left office, the farm was $1MM in debt.

MuffinFlavored 9mo ago

Is any part of this because Google has the TPU and Groq has the LPU?

wmf 9mo ago
There's definitely a narrative that ASICs/TPUs/LPUs are more efficient than GPUs and thus Nvidia "needs" an ASIC. Whether this is true is debated.

rvz 9mo ago

Great choice and what a great deal. Quite obvious that Groq would get acquired. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438820

scratchyone 9mo ago

Uh oh, not good that a major Nvidia competitor with genuine alternative technology will no longer be competing... Chances this tech gets killed post-acquisition?

pohl 9mo ago
Zero. Non-zero only if someone says something deemed “woke”.
wmf 9mo ago
It may be more likely that Nvidia sells the LPUv2 at a price that doesn't threaten Rubin.

throwup238 9mo ago

> Groq is expected to alert its investors about the deal later on Wednesday. While the acquisition includes all of Groq’s assets, its nascent Groq cloud business is not part of the transaction, said Davis. Wait, what? How is the cloud business supposed to run if Nvidia is acquiring the rights to the hardware?

ChristianJacobs 9mo ago
That's the neat trick - it isn't...
- garyfirestorm 9mo ago
  Sell the asset and then lease it from the buyer.
  - throwup238 9mo ago
    That works fine with office buildings and stuff where a company is redistributing its risk profile, but not when the company it’s selling to has every incentive to kill the asset as a competitor.
onion2k 9mo ago
It isn't, and the other companies that offer cloud AI that Nvidia has invested in can carry on happy they have one less competitor. This is how business works in the 21st century - once one company has a dominant position and a massive warchest they can just buy any business that has any potential of disrupting their revenue. It's literally the thesis Peter Thiel sets out in Zero To One. It works really well for that one business.
fancyfredbot 9mo ago
From the press release, Nvidia now has a non exclusive license to the hardware. Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer. GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.
9mo ago

kreyenborgi 9mo ago

There was an AMA here last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39429047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39429047

asdev 9mo ago

[flagged]

yellow_lead 9mo ago
He is good at scamming others
erichocean 9mo ago
nVidia is being scammed here? Seems unlikely…
- superkuh 9mo ago
  For nvidia increasing the numbers of their money-multiplying mutual investment ring is more important than the value of the deals. It's about involving more capital and people and making their grift too big to fail and keeping the stock numbers up. Nvidia has the ability to promise large amounts of money like this in announcements but I haven't read about any of them actually having money or good exchange hands yet.

behnamoh 9mo ago

I just stopped my Groq API. Sad to see competition being eaten up by shitty Nvidia. I like their products but Jensen is an absolute mfer with deceitful marketing.

archerx 9mo ago
I literally said “oh no” out loud when I read the headline.
moneywoes 9mo ago
was the API good
- behnamoh 9mo ago
  fast but furiously expensive
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Honestly cerebras is good. I can recommend it. I talked to their team once on discord as a literal free user so that was something really nice personally They were also the faster one compared to groq but they were always a little slow on adding new models compared to groq but not sure what changed right now. Definitely recommend cerebras tho now that groq's been eaten up from inside basically
    - highmastdon 9mo ago
      I had the feeling that Cerebras only supports smaller modes. Maybe something to do with their hardware arch? I never dove into it. I wanted to use Kimi K2 fast for coding and Groq was the only fast provider at the time
      - kroaton 9mo ago
        Cerebras currently has GLM4.6 on it, and will be getting GLM4.7 soon.

DebtDeflation 9mo ago

Hopefully they plan to invest in the technology and not just eliminate a competitor.

mdasen 9mo ago
They almost certainly plan to invest in the technology. One of the biggest threats to Nvidia is people developing AI-centric ASICs before they get there. Yes, Google has their TPUs and there are others around, but it's early on. In some ways, it's not about eliminating a competitor. It's about eliminating all the competitors. Nvidia can use its resources to push AI ASICs farther faster than others, potentially cutting off a whole host of competitors that threaten their business. Nvidia has the hardware and software talent, the money, and the market position to give their AI ASICs an advantage. They know if they don't lean into ASICs that someone else will and their gravy train will end. So they almost certainly won't be abandoning the technology. But that doesn't mean that it'll be good for us.

syntaxing 9mo ago

I don’t see how this isn’t anti trust but knowing this political climate, this deal will go through.

mastax 9mo ago
https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidias-huang-joins-tech-titans-funding-trumps-ballroom-2025-10-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidias-huang-joins-tech-ti...
- exasperaited 9mo ago
  Good of them to make a list themselves, isn't it? It'll be useful in the future.
  - bdangubic 9mo ago
    as useful as it was before this administration when big tech was sucking up to whomever was running the country (e.g. “macho man” Zuck was getting ready to tattoo DEI on his forehead couple of years ago) or just now it’ll be magically useful?
    - exasperaited 9mo ago
      You miss my point. This is a list of people engaging in something flat-out corrupt. The ballroom is an inherently corrupt project. It will prove to be simple corruption.
      - bdangubic 9mo ago
        whats the punishment for corruption (especially when you have 100’s of billions of dollars) I wonder…
      - mrbungie 9mo ago
        Why is that relevant if there is no one willing to prosecute and convict?

niemandhier 9mo ago

I could not figure out if „cash“ means literally cash or figuratively cash in the sense of “no trade in shares”. Will there be a truck full of paper money or not?

adam_arthur 9mo ago
Implies they will pay cash value to equity holders as opposed to issuing NVDA shares. (Electronically)
- SecretDreams 9mo ago
  Is this to somehow screw the employees with RSUs or what?
  - wmf 9mo ago
    No, it doesn't really matter if they pay in cash or stock. If you think NVDA has room to run you're welcome to use your buyout money to buy NVDA on the open market.
    - SecretDreams 9mo ago
      Well, this isn't framed as a buyout/takeover, so I was curious how existing RSUs would be cashed out? This deal is framed as IP transfer and talent transfer without owning the full company. Probably to skirt anti trust, among other things.
      - adam_arthur 9mo ago
        I'm not sure in this specific case. They could choose to pay the employees some portion of the funds. If not, the owners are likely liable to be sued for "selling in effect" without paying equity holders. Presuming the company becomes a defacto subsidiary of Nvidia (even if not legally so) My guess, without researching it, is they will compensate existing equity holders to avoid that possibility. I mean the valuation multiple is enormous, it's worth it simply to derisk the legal aspect.

Caius-Cosades 9mo ago

Nvidia. Please stop. Just stop it already.

nextworddev 9mo ago

They should have bought nbis

maz1b 9mo ago

Damn. Was hoping Groq and Cerebras would give the giants a run for their money.

piskov 9mo ago
There is still Modular
- jampekka 9mo ago
  And China.
  - jimnotgym 9mo ago
    It would be interesting if it turned out that Chinese competition was the only thing that kept this market working!
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      I imagine 2 big giants basically (Nvidia/google/amd basically influenced by a few select of people) vs (Chinese companies who have investments from the govt) its sort of like proxy wars and this is sort of whats happening in software side of things with open source models but I think that the benefit of the proxy wars is going to be for the end consumers But although on the other hand, having two large countries compete with each other while buying everything else and all feels like it astronomically increases the price if someone wants to compete with these two giants (any other country perhaps) We definitely need a better system where it doesn't feel like we are seeing pacman eat everything up basically
      - SecretDreams 9mo ago
        > Nvidia/google/amd One of these things is not like the others
    - wyre 9mo ago
      Is it not? All this money is going into AI under the fear that China will win the race to AGI. China releases open-source models that keep OpenAI/Anthropic researching and training their models, which in turn creates demand for more Nvidia GPUs.

erichocean 9mo ago

Well that sucks.

nusl 9mo ago

Legit feels like Nvidia just buying out competition to maintain their position and power in the industry. I sincerely hope they fall flat on their face.

A_D_E_P_T 9mo ago
> Legit feels like Nvidia just buying out competition to maintain their position and power Well, I mean, isn't that exactly what they should be doing? (I'm not talking about whether or not it benefits society; this is more along the lines of how they're incentivized.) Put yourself in their shoes. If you had all that cash, and you're hearing people talk of an "AI Bubble" on a daily basis, and you want to try and ensure that you ride the wave without ever crashing... the only rational thing to do is use the money to try and cover all your bases. This means buying competitors and it also means diversifying a little bit.
- BoredPositron 9mo ago
  Dunno thought AGI would make everything obsolete and it's just around the corner? It looks rather like it dawns on everyone that transformers won't bring salvation. It's a show of weakness.
- zapnuk 9mo ago
  No one is claiming that it's a bad move. It's just an anti-competitive move that could be very bad for the consumer as it makes the inference market less competitive.
- fatata123 9mo ago
  [dead]
piskov 9mo ago
Stuff like tinygrad will change this. Geohot already made nvidia run on macs via thunderbolt. Also: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983469817895198783 https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983469817895198783

nickysielicki 9mo ago

Groq press release: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusive-inference-technology-licensing-agreement-to-accelerate-ai-inference-at-global-scale https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv... > Today, Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology. The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference. > As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology. > Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer. > GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.

justincormack 9mo ago
So it is not structured as an acquisition to avoid anti trust but effectively it probably is.
- whatsupdog 9mo ago
  Yes I'm sure that "non exclusive" partnership is exactly that, wink wink!
- DivingForGold 9mo ago
  Indeed, as justincormack comments: ”It is not structured as an outright acquisition to avoid US Gov't anti trust scrutiny, but effectively it probably is”. “Non-exclusive” ? Ummmm, yeah, right, sure. You can probably bet there is an private understanding that Groq will no longer offer it's “top of the line” best technology to competitors of Nvidia. Some may see this as a clever, “slight of the hand” attempt for Nvidia to maintain it's perceived dominance & lead in GPU-TPU development. “Non-exclusive” does not in any form or fashion spell out that all Nvidia's competitors can and will obtain the very top, cutting edge Groq technology as Nvidia will obtain . . .
  - biggc 9mo ago
    What generated this comment?

fancyfredbot 9mo ago

The price is 40x their target revenue. That's twice the price to revenue multiplier applied to Anthropic in their most recent funding round, and really really hard to portray as a good deal. I don't think it really helps Nvidia's competitive position. The serious competition to Nvidia is coming from Google's TPU, Amazon's Trainium, AMD's Instinct, and to a much lesser extent Intel's ARC. Grow recent investors got back a 3x multiple and may now invest in one of Nvidia's other competitors instead.

la64710 9mo ago
Also Tsavorite scalable intelligence - their architecture seems to cover the broadest use cases and compatible with cuda
- _zoltan_ 9mo ago
  is this an ad? do you work there? I'm following the chip industry on a daily basis and never heard of them...
arisAlexis 9mo ago
And Cerebras
- YouAreWRONGtoo 9mo ago
  [dead]
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
bri3d 9mo ago
The only thing I can think of here is that OpenAI’s DRAM land grab is going to stack on a non-NV target and NV need to hedge with an SRAM design that’s on the market NOW. Otherwise, I can’t see how NV couldn’t eat Groq’s lunch in one development cycle - it’s not like NV can’t attach a TPU to some SRAM and an interconnect. Either that or Groq closed a deep enough book to scare them, but 40x is a lot of scared.

thehamkercat 9mo ago

Next they would acquire and kill Cerebras. I hate every part of Nvidia

roughly 9mo ago

The absolute best case I can make for this: I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that Nvidia’s architecture has reached scaling limits - the power demands of their latest chips has Microsoft investing in nuclear fusion. Similar to Intel in both the pre-Core days and their more recent chips, they need an actual new architecture to move forward. As sits, there’s no path to profitability for the buyers of these chips given the cost and capabilities of the current LLM architectures, and this is obvious enough that even Nvidia has to realize it’s existential for them. If Groq’s architecture can actually change the economics of inference and training sufficient to bring the costs in line with the actual, not speculative, benefits of LLMs, this may not be a buy-and-kill for Nvidia but something closer to Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi, which made the A- and M- class chips possible. (Mind you, in Intel’s case they had to have their clocks cleaned by AMD a couple times to get them to see, but I think we’re further past the point of diminishing returns with Nvidia - I think they’re far enough past when the economics turned against them that Reality is their competition now.)

jvanderbot 9mo ago
NVIDIA and "no path to profitability" don't belong in the same zip code.
- jonah 9mo ago
  I read it as path to profitability for the AI companies buying Nvidia's chips.
- roughly 9mo ago
  No path to profitability for the people using their products for their putative purpose, which seems like it might affect Nvidia’s bottom line at some point. Clarified.
wmf 9mo ago
there’s no path to profitability for the buyers of these chips given the cost and capabilities of the current LLM architectures Didn't Anthropic say inference is already profitable?

yoan9224 9mo ago

this is genuinely sad, groq had really fast inference and was a legit alternative architecture to nvidia's dominance. feels like we're watching consolidation kill innovation in real time. really hoping regulators actually look at this one but not holding my breath

exceptione 9mo ago

Following the age old playbook of monopolies. https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-america-the-cult-of-wealth-1-3/ https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame... (Use a vpn if outside EUR) A free market is a regulated market. Otherwise you will end up with monopolies and a dead market.

incrudible 9mo ago
…except they are a rather small hardware startup, there is a dozen other rather small hardware startups they did not buy, and there will be more such startups funded just on the news that NVIDIA bought one at a big premium.
- exceptione 9mo ago
  I understand your line of reasoning, but the net effect is that any competition will be eliminated. Those startups that are not posing a real threat don't count anyways. Hardware startups are not easy. If the effect is that the most likely way to make money is to be bought by the behemoth, then this distorts the market even more and suffocates innovation.

asdfsfds 9mo ago

That's great, but LLMs are still not generating revenue.

latchkey 9mo ago
They are generating revenue, profit is the dubious thing.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
SonOfKyuss 9mo ago
They’re generating tons of revenue, just not necessarily profits
irl_zebra 9mo ago
I pay $20/mo for Gemini, so they're generating at least that much in revenue!
- SecretDreams 9mo ago
  All depends on how much it costs them to service your $20/month sub in OPEX and how much it cost them in capex to buy and maintain that hardware.

nowittyusername 9mo ago

This is the most blatant buy the competition move if i've ever seen one....

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

dwa3592 9mo ago

This doesn't make much sense- In September, Groq was valued at $7B. How is it that in 4 months it is being bought for $20B? Can someone with better understanding dumb this down for me please?

ZiiS 9mo ago
It only has to be overvalued by a lower multiple then NVidia; not undervalued.
wmf 9mo ago
Imagine a pharma with a weight loss drug that isn't approved yet; it's either worth $20B (if approved) or zero (if not approved). Now imagine the LPUv2 ASIC. If it works it's worth $20B and if it doesn't it's zero. If investors think LPUv2 has a 1/3 chance of success they would buy in at $7B. Then the chip boots up and... look at that. Or it's just a massive bubble.
- moneywoes 9mo ago
  eli5 lpu please
  - ra7 9mo ago
    Groq calls their inference chips “Language Processing Unit”: https://groq.com/blog/the-groq-lpu-explained https://groq.com/blog/the-groq-lpu-explained
dandanua 9mo ago
It's an AI blackhole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21e5GZF3yx0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21e5GZF3yx0
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  I got recommended this and I will watch it today, thank you. One of the comments points out "They’ve literally told us that the plan is to get bailed out by the taxpayers" This reminded me of how I think what's gonna happen/ is already happening is that they become too big to fail and get bailed out and the burden/loss becomes of taxpayers So we are kind of living in a system which is reckless about finances/stability behind businesses where the system is such that all the profits are privatized but all the losses are shared/even funded by the average person Combine in a mix of corruption in any political party to begin with and I am wondering why we don't have yet another french revolution.

NaOH 9mo ago

Related on the business side, and from the last two years: AI Chip Startup Groq Raises $750M at $6.9B Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276985 - Sept 2025 (5 comments) Groq Raises $640M to Meet Soaring Demand for Fast AI Inference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162875 - Aug 2024 (34 comments) AI chip startup Groq lands $640M to challenge Nvidia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162463 - Aug 2024 (12 comments) Groq CEO: 'We No Longer Sell Hardware' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964590 - April 2024 (149 comments)

iamacyborg 9mo ago
From $6.9b to 20 in a few months, not bad…
- koakuma-chan 9mo ago
  Almost as good as forking VSCode, impressive.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    That was impressive to see what you did there and the harsh reality that its true hits like a brick. Don't forget that those forks of VScode are gonna be bought by Nvidia or chatgpt (OpenAI which gets invested by Nvidia) and everything else Its all one large web connecting every investment and cross-investments and everything. The bubble image which got infamous recently is definitely popping up even more. Its crazy basically.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  Acquisitions generally come in at a significantly higher price. Even in public markets, acquiring all the shares of a company will require an offer that is a significant step above the current trading price.

siliconc0w 9mo ago

Maybe the EU or individual states will sue under their own anti-trust laws will stop this - seems pretty clearly anti-competitive and probably a prelude of these over-valued companies using their stock to gobble up any possible competitor to consolidate even more.

altpaddle 9mo ago

I do not understand this move by Nvidia, they are afraid of being out competed by this startup in their core competence of building chips for AI? They may be eliminating a competitor for now but this move will immediately many more AI chip startups to get founded

sthuck 9mo ago
groq is a series E hardware startup founded in 2016. It took them this long to be a potential threat, I'm not sure they are even an actual threat. Even if this purchase causes 100 new hardware startups to be funded tomorrow, nVidia is perfectly fine with that. Let's see how many survive 5 years down the line
reissbaker 9mo ago
They're not eliminating a competitor, they're (effectively) acquiring a competitor. Nvidia's GPUs are great for training, and not bad for inference, but the custom chips are better for inference and Nvidia's worried about losing customers. Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now.
- blitzar 9mo ago
  > Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now. For $0bn they could have sold an Nvidia-like chip for inference.
baq 9mo ago
the play is 10x faster inference leads to 100x demand give or take, which isn't a bad assumption at all if you ask me. the problem is actually fitting a good model onto hardware that fast.

why-o-why 9mo ago

Can't wait for the abuse of the word Grok to die (bet none of these techbros even read the book). There was even an AI company that made a product called "Sophon". Talk about an overinflated sense of self-worth. I like the Wright Brothers, they called the first plain, "Flyer".

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

andrewinardeer 9mo ago

Headline is incorrect. NVIDIA isn't buying Groq. It's a non exclusive deal for inference tech. Or am I reading it incorrectly?

hmate9 9mo ago
There is also movement over of some key people to nvidia which is pretty significant: "As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology."
- lerchmo 9mo ago
  curious how the execs can honor the fiduciary duty to share holders assuming only they? get the 20 billion and the company is left headless and leaking all of its intellectual property to Nvidia?
  - wmf 9mo ago
    Shareholders get the $20B so that's the fiduciary responsibility fully satisfied.
davedunkin 9mo ago
Non-exclusive licensing and hiring the team. > As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology.

impulser_ 9mo ago

Are they buying them to try and slow down open source models and protect the massive amounts of money they make from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta ect? It quite obvious that open source models are catching up to closed source models very fast they about 3-4 months behind right now, and yeah they are trained on Nvidia chips, but as the open source models become more usable, and closer to closed source models they will eat into Nvidia profit as these companies aren't spending tens of billion dollars on chips to train and run inference. These are smaller models trained on fewer GPUs and they are performing as good as the pervious OpenAI and Anthropic models. So obviously open source models are a direct threat to Nvidia, and they only thing open source models struggle at is scaling inference and this is where Groq and Cerberus come into the picture as they provide the fastest inference for open source models that make them even more usable than SOTA models. Maybe I'm way off on this.

matthewfcarlson 9mo ago
Idk- cheaper inference seems to be a huge industry secret and providing the best inference tech that only works with nvidia seems like a good plan. Makes nvidia the absolute king of compute against AWS/AMD/Intel seems like a no brainer.
SkyPuncher 9mo ago
They need to vertically integrate the entire stack or they die. All of the big players are already making plans for their own chips/hardware. They see everyone else competing for the exact same vendor’s chips and need to diversify.
Workaccount2 9mo ago
Shy of an algo breakthrough, open source isn't going to catch up with SOTA, their main trick for model improvement is distilling the SOTA models. That's why they they have perpetually been "right behind".
- impulser_ 9mo ago
  They don't need to catch up. They just need to be good enough and fast as fuck. Vast majority of useful tasks of LLMs has nothing to do with how smart they are. GPT-5 models have been the most useless models out of any model released this year despite being SOTA, and it because it slow as fuck.

moneywoes 9mo ago

is this in response to the threat from Google tpu

brcmthrowaway 9mo ago

What are the other top AI silicon vendors? Graphcore Tenstorrent SambaNova Rivos

chermanowicz 9mo ago
the talk is that sambanova-intel is akin to a firesale, so who knows what the real story with any single company. same with graphcore. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/sambanova-exploring-sale-after-struggling-to-secure-further-funding-report/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/sambanova-explori...

xvector 9mo ago

Put Groq and Nvidia execs in prison, blatant anti-trust.

anonzzzies 9mo ago

I do not consider this good news; I had hopes Anthropic or so would buy them, not the main AI hardware people.

nntwozz 9mo ago

I remember when Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock. Media said it was crazy back then, well I think this sounds a lot crazier but hindsight is 20/20.

anonzzzies 9mo ago
I thought the Skype deal back then was worse: it sucked balls back then already.
twoodfin 9mo ago
And now we’re told that bet was such a sure thing that regulators should have blocked it!

yousif_123123 9mo ago

Not good. This shouldn't be allowed. What would be better is if groq and cerebras combined, and maybe other companies invested in them to help them scale. Why would the major cloud providers not lobby against this? Usually antitrust is for consumers, but here I think companies like Microsoft and AWS would be the biggest beneficiaries of having more AI chip competition.

aurareturn 9mo ago
Groq is absolutely tiny. I don't think antitrust is an issue here.
- jeromegv 9mo ago
  20 billions is tiny?
  - aurareturn 9mo ago
    That's the sales price of the company. Their marketshare, I imagine, is absolutely miniscule.
  - neilellis 9mo ago
    Is nowadays
  - derwiki 9mo ago
    WhatsApp was a tiny team
  - ignoramous 9mo ago
    Market share wise, Groq is perhaps "tiny"? Nvidia may be paying a premium for Groq [0] since it eliminates competition (at least on the inference side). [0] valued ~£6.5bn 2mo ago https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valuation-69-billion-investors-bet-ai-chips-2025-09-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valu...
nabla9 9mo ago

monster_truck 9mo ago

groq was targeting a part of the stack where cuda was weakest: guaranteed inference time at a lower cost per token at scale. This was in response to more than just goog's tpus, they were also one of the few realistic alternative paths oai had with those wafers.

Daviey 9mo ago

I got curious about how many wheelbarrows of cash $20bn actually is. Two ways to think about it: weight vs volume. By weight (assuming all $100 bills): $20,000,000,000 / $100 = 200,000,000 bills Each bill is roughly 1g, so total mass is ~200,000 kg A typical builder’s wheelbarrow can take about 100 kg before it becomes unmanageable 200,000 kg total / 100 kg per wheelbarrow ≈ 2,000 wheelbarrows (weight limit) By volume: A $100 bill is ~6.14" × 2.61" × 0.11 mm, which comes out to about 102 cm³ per bill 200,000,000 bills × 102 cm³ ≈ 20,400 m³ of cash A standard wheelbarrow holds around 0.08 m³ (80 litres) 20,400 m³ total / 0.08 m³ per wheelbarrow ≈ 255,000 wheelbarrows (volume limit) So, About 2,000 wheelbarrows if you only care about weight About 255,000 wheelbarrows if you actually have to fit the cash in So the limiting factor isn’t how heavy the money is; it’s that the physical volume of the cash is absurd. At this scale, $20bn in $100s is effectively a warehouse, not a stack.

ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
Your volume of a single bill is a bit off.
SauntSolaire 9mo ago
Something wrong about representing the weight of US dollars in metric units.
- versteegen 9mo ago
  Then what do you say to 6.14" × 2.61" × 0.11 mm = 102 cm³
- zaik 9mo ago
  They should have converted to Euros first.
- blitzar 9mo ago
  How many pounds is it? Whos on first?
- mr_toad 9mo ago
  > Something wrong about representing the weight of US dollars in metric units. The traditional unit of measure of truckloads of money is (drum roll) a dump truck. A large dump truck holds 16-20 cubic yards. https://www.catdumptruck.com/standard-dump-truck-size-chart/ https://www.catdumptruck.com/standard-dump-truck-size-chart/

moralestapia 9mo ago

"2.7M Developers and Teams" So, about ~$1,000/each? Seems pricey, even assuming all of them still use it every week/month.

skeptrune 9mo ago

I hope non executives and founders get something for their equity.

boroboro4 9mo ago

From the comment below: > Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. Makes it very hard not to think of this as a way to give money to the current administration. I know, this sounds conspiracy theory grade, but 20b is too much for groq.

laidoffamazon 9mo ago
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's basically a bribe to Chamath, Don Jr. and Sacks.
slrainka 9mo ago
The value of Groq comes from its excellent price-to-performance ratio. Its inferencing speeds are faster than those of H200s, and it has the lowest costs in the industry. When running similar batch jobs across different providers compared to Groq, the processing speed can sometimes be more than 10 times faster. These figures are important for developing practical applications for production use. It's common for me to run workloads in Groq that cost less than $100, while the same workload can approach $1,000 on Bedrock or Gemini. They have tuned a set of OS models that can now deliver a full application. The speeds have allowed me to offload a lot of the functionality from heuristics to straight-up LLMs.

jauntywundrkind 9mo ago

Will be interesting technically to see what develops from this. NVLink? Full CUDA feels maybe doubtful but who knows. Nvidia CUDA Tile feels like more of a maybe, their new much more explicit way of making workloads. This does feel a bit sad for sure, worrying whether this might hold Groq and innovation back. Reciprocally, perhaps kind of cool to see Groq get a massive funding boost and help from a very experienced chip making peer. It feels like an envious position somewhat, even with the long term consequences being so hazy. From the outside yes it looks like Nvidia solidifying their iron grasp over a market with very limited competitive suppliers, but this could help Groq, and maybe it's not on the terms we think we want right now, but could be very cool to see. I really hope some of the rest of the markets can see what's happening, broadly, with Nvidia forming partnerships all over the place. NVLink with Intel, NVLink with Amazon's Tritanium... there's much more to the ecosystem, but just connecting the chips smartly is a huge task, is core to inter-operation. And for all we've heard of CXL, UltraAccelerator Link (UALink) and UltraEthernet (UET) it feels like very few major players are taking it seriously enough to just integrate these new interconnects & make them awesome. They remain incredible expensive & not commonly used, lacking broad industry adoption, and reserved for very expensive systems: there's a huge existential risk here that (lack of) interconnect will destroy competitors ability to get their good chips well integrated and used. The rest of the market needs more clear alarm bells going off, and needs to be making sure good interconnect is available on way more chips, get it into everyone's hands ASAP not just big customers, so that adoption & Linux nerd type folks can start building stacks that open up the future. The market risks getting left behind, if NVLink is built in everywhere and the various other fabrics never become common-place.

pinkmuffinere 9mo ago

> Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer. Kindof feel bad for Simon Edwards, lol. I wonder what the plan is for the future of Groq

cavisne 9mo ago
I would assume this is a very well paid position, and with basically nothing to do.
- lerchmo 9mo ago
  I would assume he is a fiduciary... I am curious what happens with investors here?
  - porridgeraisin 9mo ago
    Probably nvidia will keep investing in random rounds groq will continue to raise.
htrp 9mo ago
He has to keep the company in business for 2 more years
- pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
  Are there consequences if he fails to do so?

nl 9mo ago

Given that Groq is basically the TPU spin out Google should have done years ago it shows what a valuable asset TPUs are in Google. Still this they should spin that out though!

shwaj 9mo ago
Groq is very different from TPUs. The difference in memory should be a big clue. (Groq using SRAM built into each compute unit, vs TPUs using HBM more similarly to GPUs)
- nl 9mo ago
  The founder created TPUs at Google. > Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan began what became Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first generation TPU chip.
  - shwaj 9mo ago
    I know, so what? Very smart people might have more than one idea in their careers. He left to pursue one of those.
  - FL33TW00D 9mo ago
    He did not "create" the TPU. He contributed to the creation of the TPU. There are 66 authors on the original TPU paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079856.3080246 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079856.3080246

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago

I believe that this news kind of helps cerebras as groq and cerebras are the only two companies working extensively in this space I feel as if Nvidia is eating up even companies which I thought had genuine potential or anything related to AI industry whether profitable or not Nvidia's trying its best to take all major players and consolidate into one big entity from top to bottom. The problem with this approach imo is that long term, nvidia's stock is extremely overvalued and its still a bubble which will burst and it will take nvidia first and foremost. The issue is that when nvidia falls, it will take the whole literal industry from top to bottom, even those companies which I thought could survive an AI burst. Long term I feel like it will have really bad impacts if nvidia continues to gobble up every company. I am pretty sure that Nvidia might be looking at cerebras too and if they offer them a shit ton of money and cerebras gets bought. I genuinely believe that Nvidia has sort of invested in literally all pockets of any hardware related investment for AI. And when OpenAI is unable to pay Nvidia, I feel like it can all come crashing down since this whole cycle is only being possible via external investor money.

ilaksh 9mo ago

The last time I tested, I could swear they were doing some problematic quantization, because I was getting kind of random results with one or two models, which worked perfectly when I switched providers. It was really disappointing too because Cerebras does not provide any service reliability on their cheap plans. So I came to the conclusion that unless I could convince the client to set up an enterprise contract or something, we could not use either provider for low-latency, which we need for voice calls. I think for organizations that can afford a hefty contract that guarantees service levels, Groq and Cerebras especially are basically cheat codes for meeting latency requirements for voice. But that might not be an option for really small businesses.. although maybe I am just not a good sales person.

sanxiyn 9mo ago

In my opinion, Groq's technical decisions are unsound in a normal world. But being HBM-free may have some merit in a world where HBM supply is constrained.

almosthere 9mo ago

Hopefully prices stay the same, I run my small apps on groq. I get good enough summarization and simple agents from gpt120b which is on 15 cents for a million input tks.

indigodaddy 9mo ago
Can you list any internet facing apps you have that use Groq? Looking into them myself because of the speed
- almosthere 9mo ago
  Still in development, but yes, the speed is absolutely nice.

mattas 9mo ago

Biggest surprise for me is that they chose to announce this on Christmas Eve. I’d love to have been in the room when that was decided. The big, exciting news doesn’t typically get announced during a major holiday week.

bgwalter 9mo ago
They want the Trump Jr. and Chamath connections to be forgotten by the time the media and YouTubers get active again after New Year. It's a standard media tactic.
- dustbunny 9mo ago
  What's your angle on the Chamath link? Is Nvidia greasing Sack's favour through Chamath?
- tokioyoyo 9mo ago
  Honestly, it's basically an accepted fact that the best thing to do is just to never respond anything that media/people say. If you respond, the conversation will continue. If you just say nothing, they'll move on to the next topic, because everyone needs to keep their audience engaged. With no response, your audience isn't interested either, so you have to move onto something else.
  - cindyllm 9mo ago
    [dead]

richardw 9mo ago

This is smart as hell. I’ve long wondered how they’d combat ASIC’s without diluting their own benefits. This gives them a bit more time to figure out the moats, which is useful because Groq was going places. This juices Groq’s distribution, production, ability to access a wider range of skills where necessary. I expect China to want to compete with this. Simpler than full-blown Nvidia chips. Cue much cheaper and faster inference for all.

dustbunny 9mo ago

Congratulations to Chamath

7e 9mo ago
For failing?

kennethologist 9mo ago

Big win for Chamath!

justinai6 9mo ago

A few thoughts: [disclaimer - I don't know anything official at all just reading the same public info that has been officially shared - this is just a few thoughts from an outsider] - The deal structure matters, and we don't have enough details yet. - If the license fee is distributed to shareholders, it goes above the liquidation preference. Anyone with common stock or options can exercise and get paid out. - The company continuing forward—I see this as great. There are discussions about it becoming just a shell, but I don't think that's the case at all. This looks like an acqui-hire for a few top people and a licensing deal for an alternative hardware approach to inference. Let's say they keep $3–4B cash in the company. That's plenty to avoid another financing round and keep cranking on growth. Groq and Cerebras can keep adding speed to open models while giving Nvidia key IP they can integrate into their large data center buildouts. Also, on deal points I think could be interesting: would you negotiate this as a one-time payment license deal? I wouldn't. Maybe it's a hurdle, so it might take a while, but let's say Nvidia pushes massive investment to deploy this Groq hardware infrastructure integrated into their full stack… A. This could produce a nice royalty stream for the Groq company that still exists—benefiting all stakeholders. B. Use Nvidia's massive ability to deploy capital and hardware pipeline and add in another unit they can sell to their fat stakes customers and ultimately to cheapen and accelerate getting fast inference in the wild quickly. And lastly, if management is smart or clever with the distribution part of this deal, maybe they convert all stock to common and squash the liquidation preference in this move. so they might have a quite compelling cap table post deal. (again hopefully structured as a distribution vs buy out) but at least pref is gone. So employees exercise, get an exit, keep their stock—with investors already happy, liquidation preference gone, and potentially a well-capitalized future royalty stream coming from the largest market cap company in the world and the largest capex pipeline ever seen. I'd much rather own the actual shares (fewer handcuffs) and have plenty of cash to deploy in a very capex-heavy moment. It just seems like a win-win-win-win. Nvidia wins new fundamentally different IP can sell to there existing customers Groq employees and stakeholders win. The open models win (big). We as AI consumers win because of cheaper, faster inference. Common to what we all want to believe here, we’re not really in a winner take all moment here. nvdia is just taking a disproportional amount because of lack of real suitable alternatives… The base will for sure widen and expand from where we are at now, but that doesn’t mean that nvidia has to or is going or loose as part of it.

supermatt 9mo ago

Is there less regulatory oversight when purchasing assets instead of the company? The near exclusive global provider of AI chips purchasing the only serious competitors technology while quite spceficially describing it as “not an acquisition” seems a bit…

supermatt 9mo ago

Is there less regulatory oversight when purchasing assets instead of the company, or do Nvidia really believe the FTC/DOJ are that blind? (Or doesn’t it matter in the current climate?) The near exclusive global provider of AI chips taking key employees from and “licensing” the technology of the only serious competitor while quite specifically describing it as “not acquiring Groq as a company” seems quite obviously anti-competitive, and quite clearly an attempt to frame it as not.

mrdevlar 9mo ago
American has not had functional anti-trust laws for the better part of the last 40 years. The current climate is just a peak.

joelthelion 9mo ago

What a disaster. Any little competition they have, they are going to buy out. The world needs much stronger anti trust laws.

PunchyHamster 9mo ago
the world needs ENFORCEMENT of existing ones. Laws don't help if government is complicit in the grift because AI is only thing propping up the GDP

wetpaws 9mo ago

[dead]

z3ratul163071 9mo ago

chamath made a killing

fyrn_ 9mo ago

Seems anticompetitive..

Sayyidalijufri 9mo ago

Someone say to me that Nvidia is not buying Groq; the deal is a non-exclusive licensing agreement for its inference technology with some team members joining Nvidia. and he gave me this link: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusive-inference-technology-licensing-agreement-to-accelerate-ai-inference-at-global-scale https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startup-groq-for-about-20-billion-biggest-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...

woadwarrior01 9mo ago
Indeed, it seems to be an Inflection-AI[1] style acquihire of senior leadership and not an acquisition. MS also entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with what was left of Inflection AI after poaching its founders. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_AI

ryzvonusef 9mo ago

people on twitter are calling it yet another acqui-hire.

kodefreeze 9mo ago

They raised at a ~6B round recently. I could have invested but missed the deadline :(

gigatexal 9mo ago

If we had a functioning government this wouldn’t be legal

mlazos 9mo ago

This is the absolute biggest grift of the century by the groq team. They never shared actual TCO, and I remember a Seminalaysis article about the power consumption being actually insane - this makes sense because they scale the number of chips to fit a single model when they have no dram. They have good inference latency but there was no way the economics were going to work out. Meanwhile Nvidia with every advantage in the world decides they’re worth 20B? It actually doesn’t make sense at all. The only scenarios the groq system would be worth it is in the exact throughput-optimized scenarios Nvidia already thrives in.

rldjbpin 9mo ago

my prediction is that nvidia will release inference-optimized hardware in the future release cycles. these chips might have a hard time to trickle down to lower-tier, but money printer go brrr.

alcomatt 9mo ago

"A Great Argument" for Capitalism and "competition" being the drive of innovation... also shows how antimonopoly regulations are just ink-on-pages and zero real-world applicability...