I assume it's more about what Groq had that Nvidia didn't want, which was competition (in inference hardware).
Groq is more of a hardware focused company.
this is just panic buying to make stronger foothold
Also tenstorrent could be a viable challenger in this space. It seems to me that their NoC and their chips could be mostly deterministic as long as you don't start adding in branches
Like Groq's chips only have 230MB of SRAM per chip vs 80GB on an H100, training is memory hungry as you need to hold model weights + gradients + optimizer states + intermediate activations.
Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash
If you're just a worker then demand fair market wages, work healthy hours, and treat your useless class of shares as already used and discarded scratch off lottery tickets.
I fully expect to be lied to repeatedly though about my own pay, our prospects, etc. I had to learn the hard way that these lies are defacto legal because employees won't realistically be able to sue.
But hey, the base pay is probably enough.
A lot of good engineers are out of work. They'll gladly take what they can
edit: which doesn’t mean join companies you don’t believe in! Please do. But don’t expect it to be there, don’t include it in life plans, don’t pay attention to valuations, etc.
if this does end up being something that is legal and successfully circumvents anti trust, does it mean antitrust actually is a failure in practice?
2026 hasn't even begun and more shenanigans are in flight.
the fix is we use more ambiguous words or just stronger government control
see how China "control" capitalist on this case if you want absolute government control
my point is making a law that a "future proof" is impossible, since guess what???? Human just cant account for every possible future scenario
If it was a normal acquisition, it would automatically trigger anti-trust investigations. Under the current administration, I think it is unlikely the acquisition would be blocked (although it probably should be...), but it would involve more bureaucracy, and would take longer.
Is it really a given that GroqCloud is going to be sunset and the company will die?
Couldn’t this company hire talent and continue to operate and maybe even innovate? Couldn’t Groq even hire back some employees from Nvidia? If any of them live in California there’s nothing stopping them and they have a bunch of cash from Nvidia. There are all kinds of loopholes for that like contracting arrangements.
Nvidia doesn’t really have exclusive access to any part of the company. They didn’t necessarily remove a competitor, though I’ll grant that they likely did in practice.
It’s potentially possible that the regulations did their job and kept a competitor on the market, though again I imagine this is my naevity speaking and that the most likely outcome is that Groq will wither.
I also don’t fully understand if the Saudis are getting cashed out or not. Are they really going to roll over and allow their Saudi AI data center to become worthless? I would think they have a lot of motivation after this deal to make sure Groq still operates and serves their goals.
I have some doubts about this point. IP is IP, independent of the people who invented it. If a different hardware company were to also pay for a non-exclusive IP license, maybe it will just take a few months to catch up. It’s like inheriting a codebase written by another team, and there will be some pain and some time needed to integrate it.
In fact if GroqCloud wishes to survive, it should very well just attract licensees for its IP and collect license fees for the foreseeable future.
Matthew Berman (youtuber) mentioned he's invested in groq and found out same time as everyone else. Guessing he's a small/indirect investor but still telling
So if VCs are getting paid a certain share price, employees with vested stock almost certainly are getting the same price. And probably employees with vested options can either exercise now or will just get paid the net during the transaction.
Yes, the company is probably doomed so people staying there are not doing well, but they also just got paid a 3x premium on their vested equity.
Unlike Windsurf... who's 2nd employee only got 1% of what their shares were worth (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44673296)
Really? At least for LLMs, most actual usage is concentrated on huge SOTA models. 1 trillion parameters or more. And LLMs seem to be the lion's share of AI compute demand.
Any employees of those companies lurking here? I'm curious how the morale is now.
- Avoids regulatory scrutiny (for now at least)
- Nobody is actually entrenched enough for customers to matter
- Weird "celebrity" culture in tech, and AI especially. Everyone is looking for a "whisperer" or a "godfather" or whatever.
- Investors still get paid out
Smart operational talent will probably adapt by demanding higher salary, signing bonuses, severance packages in lieu of equity. Distribution of the true "lottery tickets" will get more uneven.
This is depressing.
We’ve entered a new era. Big companies don’t need your startup. They only need your smart guys. Just those few guys. You keep the rest of your engineers and figure out what to do with them.
And lately, the answer has been, “wind it all down”.
This sucks so bad for most of their employees. But it’s a signal to the labor market:
Be very honest about what you are. Are you an AI expert? Or a TF/Pytorch monkey? If you’re not the key guy, ask for a good salary up front. Because I don’t see a future where the acquiring companies start needing you as well.
ossa-ma•3h ago
Nvidia explicitly did NOT acquire Groq. They licensed the IP and hired the talent. This structure dodges CFIUS review (Groq had $1.5B in Saudi government contracts), antitrust scrutiny, and years of regulatory delays.
The $13B premium over the September valuation was the cost of regulatory arbitrage. Announced Christmas Eve while Trump's AI Czar (Chamath's All-In podcast co-host) is in office. Chamath's Social Capital made AT LEAST ~$2B on this exit.
My article breaks down: what Nvidia actually bought vs what they left behind, why the deal structure matters, who got paid, and the political connections nobody's talking about.
lotsofpulp•1h ago
>Let's look at the sh he dumped on retail with his abysmal SPAC track record
I do not see why one would feel animosity towards Chamath for this reason. Was there fraud involved? Otherwise, all investors are liable for doing their own due diligence.
ossa-ma•1h ago
The other part is he has a track record of dumping on retail then telling them not to buy his next deal once he's already cashed out.
Aboutplants•1h ago
design2203•1h ago
ALittleLight•45m ago
yellow_postit•1h ago