> 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.
I wonder if equity holding employees get anything from the deal or indeed if all the investors will be seeing a return from this?
She didn't see a dime out of it, and was let off (together with a big chunk of people) within 6 months.
I’m more curious how angel investors are being treated in these exits. If _they_ dry up the whole pipeline goes away
Non-essential employees and small investors without the incentive or pockets to fund a legal fight get offered as little as possible. This structure also provides lots of flexibility to the 'not acquirer' when it comes to paying off existing debts, leases, contracts, etc. Basically, this is the end of being an early employee or small angel investor potentially resulting in a lucrative payoff. You have to remain central and 'key' all the way through the 'not acquisition'. I expect smaller early stage investors will start demanding special terms to guarantee a certain level of payout in a 'not acquisition'. I also expect this to create some very unfortunate situations because an asset sale (as they used to be done), could be a useful and appropriate mechanism to preserve the products and some jobs of a failing (but not yet fully failed) company - which was better for customers and some employees than a complete smoking crater.
So the only ones getting shafted are the employees.
Yes, correct
Boy, it would be so nice if a major correction were to drain these massive companies' warchests so that it doesn't become more common.
During boom times it made more financial sense to go straight to a FAANG if you could.
Let's face it and accept that the golden days of people working in tech startup (and soon large companies) are over.
RIP 1980 - 2023.
I guess you'll have to face the music at some point.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
/s
If you exercise your options you have real stock in the company, so I don't see how you can get shafted here.
Did investors do some sort of dividend cash out before employees were able to exercise their options? (Obviously shady, but more about investors/leadership being unethical than the deal structure).
Would love to know more about how this played out.
But these new “acquisitions” aren’t even that. They are not acquisitions at all. They just hire the talent directly with perhaps an ip rights agreement thrown in as a fig leaf.
The fact that these are not really acquisitions doesn't change the fact that Groq the entity now has $20b.
In the deal mentioned above: my guess is that preferred class shareholders and common shares got paid out but the common shareholders had such a low payout that it rounded down to zero for most employees.
This can happen even in a regular acquisition because of the equity capital stack of who gets paid first. Investors typically require a 1x liquidation preference (they get their investment back first no matter what).
The deals are all weird so it's hard to really know what's happening, but if Groq gets $20b, I don't see how common stock holders don't get paid.
I've seen some discussion that paying out normal employees might look more like an acquisition on paper which they may want to avoid for ftc reasons. I've also seen some discussion that this is a quid pro quo to the trump family to get Nvidia back into China (jr. bought in at the September financing round..).
Lots of speculation in general, including why nvda chose to spend 20bil on this.
Dividends to only one class seems crazy. I would be kind of shocked if that was legal.
If you were an employee, you were not a founder. A founding-employee would be someone who explicitly "invested" time/money into a company without compensation. If you are also an employee earning a wage you better have a written agreement stating what amount was "investment" and what amount was compensated wage.
As an aside, most founders are paid during the entire project. It’s not hard to raise a preseed round to get yourself paid for 6-24 months to work on an idea. If a founder chose to bootstrap - that’s all fine, but let’s not pretend that the employees aren’t taking massive career risks vs “standard” employers.
I don’t know about you, but every company I’ve ever worked at is a shitty business partner if that’s the metric. The standard has always been I get what we agreed to if I was lucky, and otherwise I got full “I’ve altered the deal, pray I don’t alter further” and dared you to defend your rights.
I actually have called their bluff a few times and gotten some money out of it, but it was always a year long event or more to resolution and involved risking even more money on lawyers.
Your startup won't succeed when its founder starves to death. It's why the founder will usually get a bunch of cash during investment rounds [0]: they can't focus on the company if they are constantly worried about cash in their personal life. Unless the founder is already independently wealthy, it is a guarantee that they'll be employed by the company and being paid a living wage. Heck, in some countries this is even legally required!
According to your logic, no successful startup will ever have a founder, as any form of pay instantly degrades them to regular employee, and any kind risk taken and below-market salary is completely irrelevant. Never mind the fact that they are taking home a minimum-wage salary while working 100 hours a week - they are earning a wage so they can't possibly be a founder.
So if this logic already breaks down for the founder, why couldn't it also break down for early employees whose compensation is mostly in stock options? How is their situation any different from the founder's?
[0]: https://www.stefantheard.com/silicon-valleys-best-kept-secre...
If you were an employee, you were not a founder. A founding-employee would be someone who explicitly "invested" uncompensated time/money into a company without compensation and also worked as an employee. If you are also an employee earning a wage you better have a written agreement stating what amount was "investment" and what amount was compensated wage.
Getting screwed out of your payout by such a totally-not-an-acquisition is wage theft. It's like promising a sales-related bonus at the beginning of the year, and then in December changing the metric to "AI-related sales to the CEO's golf buddies".
I understand that a lot of inexperienced people (like in this thread) think they're going to get rich though.
No, it is not "wage theft" to not get rich when the company exits (by whatever means).
Groq is now changing the deal after the fact by making those stock options worthless 100% of the time. It's like you participate in a lottery, and then the organizer decides to just not do a draw and keep all the proceeds for themselves. Sorry, but that's theft.
Don't intend to pay out in the unlikely event that you hit it big? Then don't offer stock options to your employees and pay market-rate salaries - plus of course a decent premium for the fact that (unlike an established company) your startup can go bust at any time and doesn't offer stable employment. You can't have it both ways.
> No, it is not "wage theft" to not get rich when the company exits
I don't think anyone in this thread thinks they're gonna get rich by working for a startup. There's a hope that they will, that's why they are working, but there's no expectation. Maybe there's an expectation of getting a nice tidy sum after an exit (in the 5 or 6 figures) but not in the 7 or 8 figures, at least not if they're just employees and not founders.
What's being discussed is a startup exiting for billions of dollars and the employees with equity seeing zero of it.
Working for a startup usually means lower wages and longer hours, for the chance at striking it rich if the company succeeds. If employees don't see anything when the company succeeds, there's literally no upside to working for a startup.
If the employer is explicitly making the employee options worthless, then they should be obligated to disclose this. Otherwise it’s trivial to engineer a corporate entity which pays the employees while “licensing” the technology from an IP holding firm. Later they can simply sell the IP holding firm without owing employees a dollar.
This promise may have been more true before 2010s where public companies were not paying as much in liquid cash and private companies were not valued so aggressively. Fact is most employees take the startup offer because they don't actually have a liquid offer that's super competitive at that moment, or they are just kind of bored and taking a break of the corporate job that does not give them too many responsibilities, i.e. they are compensated via the title, not just the promise of making bank.
I've seen venture capital acquire startups for essentially nothing laying off the entire product team aside from one DevOps engineer to keep everything running. I've seen startups go public and have their shares plummet to zero before the rank-and-file employees could sell any shares (but of course the executives were able to cash out immediately). I've seen startups acquired for essentially nothing from the lead investor.
In none of these scenarios did any of the Engineers receive anything for their shares.
Yet every day people negotiate comp where shares are valued as anything more than funny money.
When I have asked LLMs to read/dictate a linked text, the output is usually not a clean read but something reinterpreted with its own style.
A really strange agreement where top executives of a company "join" another company for the benefit of the other company.
If it quacks like a duck...
This is exactly what nvidia tried to do with 3dfx 25 years ago. They have experience of screwing people over!
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.
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.
Ideally I would have both fast and SOTA; if I would have to pick one I’d go with SOTA.
There a report by OpenRouter on what folks tend to pay for it; it generally is SOTA in the coding domain. Folks are still paying a premium for them today.
There is a question if there is a bar where coding models are “good enough”; for myself I always want smarter / SOTA.
I think the bar for when coding models are "good enough" will be a tradeoff between performance and price. I could be using Cerebras Code and saving $50 a month, but Opus 4.5 is fast enough and I value the piece-of-mind I have knowing it's quality is higher than Cerebras' open source models to spend the extra money. It might take a while for this gap to close, and what is considered "good enough" will be different for every developer, but certainly this gap cannot exist forever.
Hard disagree. There are very few scenarios where I'd pick speed (quantity) over intelligence (quality) for anything remotely to do with building systems.
Implicit in your claim are specific assumptions about how expensive/untenable it is to build systemic guardrails and human feedback, and specific cost/benefit ratio of approximate goal attainment instead of perfect goal attainment. Rest assured that there is a whole portfolio of situations where different design points make most sense.
1. law of diminishing returns - AI is already much, much faster at many tasks than humans, especially at spitting out text, so becoming even faster doesn’t always make that much of a difference. 2. theory of constraints - throughput of a system is mostly limited by the „weakest link“ or slowest part, which might not be the LLM, but some human-in-the-loop, which might be reduced only by smarter AI, not by faster AI. 3. Intelligence is an emergent property of a system, not a property of its parts - with other words: intelligent behaviour is created through interactions. More powerful LLMs enable new levels of interaction that are just not available with less capable models. You don’t want to bring a knife, not even the quickest one in town, to a massive war of nukes.
The current SOTA models are impressive but still far from what I’d consider good enough to not be a constant exercise in frustration. When the SOTA models still have a long way to go, the open weights models have an even further gap distance to catch up.
Reason is: while these models look promising in benchmarks and seem very capable at an affordable price, I *strongly* felt that OpenAI models perform better most of the times. I had to cleanup Gemini mess or Claude mess after vibe coding too much. OpenAI models are just much more reliable with large scale tasks, organizing, chomping tasks one by one etc. That takes its time but the results are 100% worth it.
I'd like more speed but prefer more quality than more speed.
We should be glad that the foundation model companies are stuck running on treadmills. Runaway success would be bad for everyone else in the market.
Let them sweat.
Could you elaborate? How is this done and what does this mean?
I also haven’t seen any hard data on how much they do use distillation like techniques. They for sure used a bunch of synthetic generated data to get better at reasoning, something that is now commonplace.
The opposite, I think.
Why do you think that local models are a direct threat to Nvidia?
Why would Nvidia let a few of their large customers have more leverage by not diversifying to consumers? Openai decided to eat into Nvidia's manufacturing supply by buying DRAM; that's concretely threatening behavior from one of Nvidia's larger customers.
If Groq sells technology that allows for local models to be used better, why would that /not/ be a profit source for Nvidia to incorporate? Nvidia owes a lot of their success on the consumer market. This is a pattern in the history of computer tech development. Intel forgot this. AMD knows this. See where everyone is now.
Besides, there are going to be more Groqs in the future. Is it worth spending ~20B for each of them to continue to choke-hold the consumer market? Nvidia can afford to look further.
It'd be a lot harder to assume good faith if Openai ended up buying Groq. Maybe Nvidia knows this.
And likely some of them are going to be in countries that won't let them sell out to Nvidia.
Almost all open source models are trained and mostly run on NVIDIA hardware.
Open source is great for NVIDIA. They want more open source, not less.
Commoditize your complement is business 101.
I would guess their interconnect technology is what NVIDIA wants. You need something like 75 adapters for an 8b parameter model they had some really interesting tech to make the accelerator to accelerator communication work and scale. They were able to do that well before nvl 72 and they scale to hundreds of adapters since large models require more adapters still.
We will know in a few months.
That's a non-charitable interpretation of what happened. The are not "spending $20 billion to handicap Groq". They are handing Groq $20 billion to do whatever they want with it. Groq can take this money and build more chips, do more R&D, hire more people. $20 billion is truly a lot of money. It's quite hard to "handicap" someone by giving them $20 billion.
> Groq added that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO.
Inference hardware company
Your words.
Because it's very good tech for inference?
It doesn't even do training.
And most inference providers for Open Source models use NVIDIA eg Fireworks, Basten, TogetherAI etc.
Most NVIDIA sales go to training clusters. That is changing but it'd be an interesting strategy to differentiate the training and inference lines.
If anything more companies in making models business the higher NVIDIA chip demand will be, till we get some proper competition at least. We badly need some open CUDA equivalent so moving off to competition isn't a problem
Yeah I'm disappointed by this, this is clearly to move them out of the market. Still, that leaves a vacuum for someone else to fill. I was extremely impressed by Groq last I messed about with it, the inference speed was bonkers.
That said, it's completely anti-competitive. Nvidia could design a inference chip themselves, but instead the are locking down one of the only real independents. But... Nobody was saying Groq was making any real money. This might just be a rescue mission.
The open source economy relies on the wisdom of crowds. But that implies and equal access to experimentation platforms. The democratization of PC and consumer hardware brings the previous open source era that we all love, I am afraid the tech mongols had identified the chokehold of LLM ecosystem and found ways to successfully monopolized it
The more competition, the more shovels they sell.
It's like saying that Intel would've benefited if only Dell and few others sold servers because they brought in multiple billions per year.
> Maybe I'm way off on this.
If by open source, you mean downloadable from huggingface and SOTA you mean opus 4.5, yes you are way off.
Look at Nvidia nemotron series. They hav become a leading open source training lab themselves and they’re releasing the best training data, training tooling, and models at this point.
It will prove to be simple corruption.
All they have is a demolition site. There's no final design. Trump keeps changing his vision of his mausoleum. They don't have an architect since the previous one quit.
They have less than a week to submit construction plans[1], and they're clearly missing that deadline. It is of course not the end, but it's a sign of things to come, about half a year in.
Trump is personally running the project instead of delegating it and as we all know he's ruled by whims and disorganized plus rapidly mentally deteriorating at 79 years of age. He's talking about getting into heaven and desperately slapping his name on random physical things because he's obsessed with leaving a grandiose "legacy", any kind of mark on history. He will, but it'll rather be as a seditionist and corrupt ravager of civil institutions and the rule of law -- a pitiful despoiler.
There's no section about the ball room in Project 2025, and no one else but Trump cares about this pet project.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-denies-request-to-tempora...
But demolishing a third of the White House? That'll be clearly visible in every single aerial shot of the building during every single political event for years. It is, quite literally, a scar on the political face of the country.
It's like turning the Pentagon into a Square, or blowing Washington's face off Mount Rushmore, or selling Alaska back to Russia: you're not going to forget when you are constantly being reminded of it.
What do those people have to do with anything besides being popular right-wing targets?
His approval rating is currently around 42%.
It should be noted that Don Jr. is one of the investors who will benefit greatly if/when this goes through.
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.
Joke aside, the strategic choices here and there hint at the blood lust of all other actors to dethrone Nvidia, it’s fascinating.
As an example: if google TPU (perfected?) itself to the point that it hurts nvidia sales (maybe mass production perhaps?) then all the companies stock price might decrease (in my opinion including google)
Honestly, I feel like there is going to happen something in the market which is gonna be very spooky soon regarding AI.
I feel like we are gonna drag this bubble really long and actually worsen all the pain which is gonna be caused by it long term.
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.
It's just an anti-competitive move that could be very bad for the consumer as it makes the inference market less competitive.
it's not like Nvidia doesn't invest a ton into R&D, but hey, they have the cash, why not use it? like a good business.
In this case, removing a competitor, absorbing their IP, and maintain their ability to dictate the direction of an entire industry. They're hurting the industry itself by removing competition, since competition is good for consumers and also good for progression forward.
Businesses with a monopoly of some sort often stop innovating in the space and end up slowing the entire thing down. Often, they do their best to block anything and anyone that tries to do better, and effectively keep progress back in doing so, simply to maintain their position.
They're selfish self-preserving entities often driven by the same kinds of people, disregarding the harm they do in the name of profits and shareholder "value". Sure, until someone disrupts that (or they get bought out and dissolved).
However, I would say you are wrong about it being only smoke
It is peak delulu.
Edit: His whole blog is 'hot take #n'. Not even anything serious. Basically podcast bro level stuff. https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/12/22/the-o...
I don't mean that pejoratively, I apologize for the bluntness. It's just I've been dealing with his nonsense since iPhone OS 1.0 x jailbreaking, and I hate seeing people taken advantage of.
(nvidia x macs x thunderbolt has been a thing for years and years and years, well before geohot) (tweet is non-sequitor beyond bogstandard geohot tells: odd obsession with LoC, and we're 2 years away from Changing The Game, just like we were 2 years ago)
It is not tied to nvidia as well.
This is the power of tinygrad
My guess is you're trying to communicate "tinygrad doesn't need gpu drivers" which maybe is transmutated into "tinygrad replaces CUDA" and you think "CUDA means other GPUs can't be used for LLMs, thus nvidia has a strangehold"
I know George has pushed this idea for years now, but, you have to look no further than AMD/Google making massive deals to understand how it works on the ground.
I hope he doesn't victimize you further with his rants. It's cruel of him to use people to assuage this own ego and make them look silly in public.
Re: has someone else does this? https://github.com/albertstarfield/apple-slick-rtx (May 2024, 19 months ago. didn't bother looking further than 4th google result for "apple silicon external gpu")
Wonder what happened that it never came.
> Willy's got his i3-12100 Gen RTX3090 hosted on Ubuntu with Juice Server
E-gpu my ass
The world needs much stronger anti trust laws.
NVIDIA isn't buying Groq.
It's a non exclusive deal for inference tech. Or am I reading it incorrectly?
> 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.
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.
[0] valued ~£6.5bn 2mo ago https://www.reuters.com/business/groq-more-than-doubles-valu...
No reason for antitrust action whatsoever.
It's literally:
"I don't want you and your 200 tensorflow/pytorch monkeys. I just want your top scientist and I need a clever way to offer him a nine figure salary. Good of you to grant him so much stock and not options. Now I can just make a transfer to your shareholders, of which he is one! Awesome! Now I don't have to buy your company!"
I'll give you bonus points if you can guess what happens to the worthless options all those TF/PyTorch monkeys are holding?
Guys, seriously, be careful who you go to work for, because chances are, you are not the key scientist.
You can't have the government coming in telling a scientist who he has to work for. People are free to take jobs at whatever company they like.
This is just a clever mechanism of paying that intellectual capital an amount of money so far outside the bounds of a normal salary that it borders on obscenity.
All that said, I don't say anything when Jordan Love or Patrick Mahomes are paid hundreds of millions, so I need to learn to shut my mouth in this case as well. I just think it sucks for the regular employees. I guarantee they will lose their jobs over the next 24 months.
There isn't to be shared between the two techs, Groq's hardware is a like a railgun that installs all the weights into the optimal location before firing off an inference. Cerebras computer engineering more convention requiring the same data movement that GPUs struggle with optimizing.
Suspect Groq is complementary/superior to nvidia's GPUs, while it is unclear what Cerebras brings other then maybe some deals with TSMC.
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
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
One of these things is not like the others
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.
For $0bn they could have sold an Nvidia-like chip for inference.
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
and he gave me this link:
https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...
Can someone with better understanding dumb this down for me please?
The acquisition price of a company usually comes at a premium to the last valuation. This applies even with publicly traded companies, which is why acquisition announcements cause stock prices to pop up to some number between the last trade price and the acquisition price, proportional to how much the market thinks the acquisition is likely to go through.
The premium can make sense to the acquirer because the acquired company is worth more when combined with all of the assets and power (brand name, distribution, patents, trade secrets) of the acquiring company.
This confuses a lot of people who think the valuation of a company is equivalent to the number that would be paid to acquire it at that instant, but it’s not.
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.
A year ago it wasn't clear if they'd stay competitive but it seems they are.
"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.
All-In pundit Palihapitiya is invested in Groq as well. It is going well for friends of David Sacks.
I expect China to want to compete with this. Simpler than full-blown Nvidia chips. Cue much cheaper and faster inference for all.
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.)
Didn't Anthropic say inference is already profitable?
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.
Still this they should spin that out though!
> 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.
There are 66 authors on the original TPU paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079856.3080246
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…
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.
Kindof feel bad for Simon Edwards, lol. I wonder what the plan is for the future of Groq
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.
Will there be a truck full of paper money or not?
(Electronically)
This deal is framed as IP transfer and talent transfer without owning the full company. Probably to skirt anti trust, among other things.
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.
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.
Media said it was crazy back then, well I think this sounds a lot crazier but hindsight is 20/20.
So, about ~$1,000/each? Seems pricey, even assuming all of them still use it every week/month.
Graphcore
Tenstorrent
SambaNova
Rivos
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/sambanova-explori...
> 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.
I like the Wright Brothers, they called the first plain, "Flyer".
- 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.
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.
Quite obvious that Groq would get acquired. [0]
Wait, what? How is the cloud business supposed to run if Nvidia is acquiring the rights to the hardware?
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.
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.
A free market is a regulated market. Otherwise you will end up with monopolies and a dead market.
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.
States are "not allowed" to regulate AI companies.
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.
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.
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/
AI Chip Startup Groq Raises $750M at $6.9B Valuation - 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 - Aug 2024 (34 comments)
AI chip startup Groq lands $640M to challenge Nvidia - 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 - April 2024 (149 comments)
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.
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.