549 pointsby nickrubin14 hours ago64 comments
  • nickysielicki13 hours ago
    Groq press release: 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.

    • gchadwick13 hours ago
      Another example of the growing trend of buying out key parts of a company to avoid any actual acquisition?

      I wonder if equity holding employees get anything from the deal or indeed if all the investors will be seeing a return from this?

      • jbkkd6 hours ago
        I have a friend who worked in a company that got "not acquired" in a similar deal.

        She didn't see a dime out of it, and was let off (together with a big chunk of people) within 6 months.

        • sigmoid102 hours ago
          As this gets more common, I think it will eventually lead to startups having a hard time attracting talent with lucrative equity compensation. It will be interesting to see how long it takes until this catches on among employees, but I already wouldn't take any positions in startups with a significant payment in equity anymore. The chances are slim that this pays out anyways, but now even when you are successful, noone will stop some megacorp from just buying the product and key employees and leaving everyone else with their stake in the dust.
      • lumost10 hours ago
        I wonder if such deals will create employee lawsuits. I'd certainly be looking at legal options if I was one of the founding employees.
        • wmf10 hours ago
          The employees are getting paid twice.
          • idiotsecant5 hours ago
            The employees are getting paid zero times.
            • petcat2 hours ago
              do they make a salary
              • simonh2 hours ago
                If part of their remuneration is in shares, they have a legitimate interest in the value of those shares.
          • sleepingreset9 hours ago
            wdym?
      • mupuff12343 hours ago
        If I had to guess I'd say investors get their returns but non exec employees mostly get screwed.
      • benjaminwoottonan hour ago
        It’s yet another way for investors to screw early employees whose face doesn’t fit.
    • justincormack13 hours ago
      So it is not structured as an acquisition to avoid anti trust but effectively it probably is.
      • whatsupdog13 hours ago
        Yes I'm sure that "non exclusive" partnership is exactly that, wink wink!
      • DivingForGold12 hours 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 . . .
        • biggc10 hours ago
          What generated this comment?
          • symbogra8 hours ago
            Probably a good old fashioned Mk 1 Human Brain given the use of "slight of hand"
          • deaux6 hours ago
            Looks like a normal comment to me, what makes you think otherwise? It has pretty much no hallmarks of being generated, and plenty that point towards the opposite.
            • squigz5 hours ago
              Starting the comment pointing out the name of the user you're replying to, and quoting the exact comment you're replying to, does sound really strange.
              • tibbar2 hours ago
                I think it's intended as a response to a sibling comment.
            • ilikehurdles5 hours ago
              Quoting the user it’s replying to in third person, and then hallucinating words inside the quote.

              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.

          • rising-sky9 hours ago
            Grok... with a k
          • janderson2157 hours ago
            GPT1 Nano
    • bossyTeacher8 hours ago
      > 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.

      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...

      • idiotsecant5 hours ago
        In the current political climate you only need to slightly pretend to care about the appearance of being a monopoly, just enough to give plausible deniability in a sound bite. Anything else isn't worth it.
    • 8 hours ago
      undefined
  • impulser_13 hours 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.

    • PunchyHamster2 hours ago
      You still need hardware to run open source models. It might eat into OpenAI profit but I doubt it will eat into NVIDIA's

      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

    • Workaccount212 hours 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_12 hours 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.

        • AmazingTurtle43 minutes ago
          I'd prefer a 30 minute response from GPT-5 over a 10 minute Response from {Claude/Google} <whatever their SOTA model is> (yes, even gemini 3)

          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.

        • aschobel12 hours ago
          For coding I don’t use any of the previous gen models anymore.

          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.

          • wyre11 hours ago
            FWIW coding is one of the largest usages for LLM's where SOTA quality matters.

            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.

        • gejose9 hours ago
          > just need to be good enough and fast as fuck

          Hard disagree. There are very few scenarios where I'd pick speed (quantity) over intelligence (quality) for anything remotely to do with building systems.

          • ssivark5 hours ago
            If you thought a human working on something will benefit from being "agile" (building fast, shipping quickly, iterating, getting feedback, improving), why should it be any different from AI models?

            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.

            • nkmnz4 hours ago
              > why should it be any different from AI models?

              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.

          • jameshush8 hours ago
            I agree with you for many use cases, but for the use case I'm focused on (Voice AI) speed is absolutely everything. Every millisecond counts for voice, and most voice use cases don't require anything close to "deep thinking. E.g., for inbound customer support use cases, we really just want the voice agent to be fast and follow the SOP.
            • nkmnz4 hours ago
              If you have a SOP, most of the decision logic can be encoded and strictly enforced. There is zero intelligence involved in this process, it’s just if/else. The key part is understanding the customer request and mapping it to the cases encoded in the SOP - and for that part, intelligence is absolutely required or your customers will not feel „supported“ at all, but be better off with a simple form.
          • gessha6 hours ago
            As long as the faster tech is reliable and I understand its quirks, I can work with it.
        • Aurornis9 hours ago
          > They don't need to catch up. They just need to be good enough

          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.

        • nl12 hours ago
          GPT 5 Codex is great - the best coding model around except maybe for Opus.

          I'd like more speed but prefer more quality than more speed.

        • Demiurge10 hours ago
          I get GPT 5.2 responses on copilot faster than for any other model, almost instantly. Are you sure they’re slow as fuck?
        • dontwannahearit12 hours ago
          Confused. Is ‘fuck’ fast or slow? Or both at the same time? Is there a sort of quantum superposition of fuck?
          • ThrowawayTestr12 hours ago
            It's an intensifier
            • blackoil3 hours ago
              Wasn't that supposed to be 'ass'
              • imcritic11 minutes ago
                Then how would double intensifier look like?
          • 10 hours ago
            undefined
          • 867-530912 hours ago
            well, it's not slow as fuck! it's quick as lightning and speedy as hell
        • echelon9 hours ago
          This. You can distill a foundation model into open source. The Chinese will be doing this for us for a long time.

          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.

        • nineteen99912 hours ago
          Bullseye.
      • blackoil3 hours ago
        We trust in our lord and savior China and Zuck to keep the peasants fed.
      • _fizz_buzz_10 hours ago
        > their main trick for model improvement is distilling the SOTA models

        Could you elaborate? How is this done and what does this mean?

        • MobiusHorizons10 hours ago
          I am by no means an expert, but I think it is a process that allows training LLMs from other LLMs without needing as much compute or nearly as much data as training from scratch. I think this was the thing deepseek pioneered. Don’t quote me on any of that though.
          • tensor6 hours ago
            No, distillation is far older than deepseek. Deepseek was impressive because of algorithmic improvements that allowed them to train a model of that size with vastly less compute than anyone expected, even using distillation.

            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.

          • tickerticker6 hours ago
            Yes. They bounced millions of queries off of ChatGPT to teach/form/train their DeepSeek model. This bot-like querying was the "distillation."
            • orbital-decay4 hours ago
              They definitely didn't. They demonstrated their stuff long before OAI and the models were nothing like each other.
            • SirMaster5 hours ago
              Why would OpenAI allow someone to do that?
              • MadnessASAP4 hours ago
                They didn't, but how do you stop it? Presuming the scale that OpenAI is running at?
      • mistercheph9 hours ago
        Too bad, so sad for the Mister Krabs secret recipe-pilled labs. Shy of something fundamental changing, it will always be possible to make a distillation that is 98% as good as a frontier model for ~1% of the cost of training the SOTA model. Some technology just wants to be free :)
      • stx59 hours ago
        [dead]
    • jayanmn18 minutes ago
      China may take over the open source part. That is the only country with exposure to hardware, software and political might.
    • AmazingTurtlean hour ago
      Show me an affordable open source coding model thats closet to GPT-5.2-codex capabilities. Note: I do not have tons of HBM lying around
    • Kiboneu6 hours ago
      >Are they buying them to try and slow down open source models

      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.

      • deaux5 hours ago
        > Besides, there are going to be more Groqs in the future.

        And likely some of them are going to be in countries that won't let them sell out to Nvidia.

    • nl12 hours ago
      NVIDIA release some of the best open source models around.

      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.

      • impulser_12 hours ago
        Then why are they spending $20 billion dollars to handicap an inference company that giving open source models a major advantage over closed source models?
        • gpapilion8 hours ago
          Realistically groq is a great solution but has near impossible requirements for deployment. Just look at how many adapters you need to meet the memory requirements of a small llm. SRAM is fast but small.

          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.

        • nl8 hours ago
          > handicap

          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.

        • credit_guy11 hours ago
          > to handicap an inference company

          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.

          • wmf11 hours ago
            Groq doesn't have any employees. They can't do R&D because there's no one to do it. The $20B goes to Groq's investors.
            • credit_guy8 hours ago
              From the article:

                > Groq added that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO. 
              
              The $20B does not go to Groq's investors. It goes to Groq. You can say that Groq is owned by its investors, and this is the same thing, but it's not. In order for the money to go to the investors, Groq needs to disburse a dividend, or to buy back shares. There is no indication that this will happen. And what's more, the investors don't even need this to happen. I'm sure any investor that wants to sell their shares in Groq will now find plenty of buyers at a very advantageous price.
              • wmf8 hours ago
                Let's bet on this shit. Where's the Polymarket.
        • p1esk10 hours ago
          they spending $20 billion dollars to handicap an inference company

          Inference hardware company

    • epolanski43 minutes ago
      I don't see where is the benefit for Nvidia to limit the open source models.

      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.

    • ilaksh11 hours ago
      Yes, you are way off, because Groq doesn't make open source models. Groq makes innovative AI accelerator chips that are significantly faster than Nvidia's.
      • zamalek11 hours ago
        > Groq makes innovative AI accelerator chips that are significantly faster than Nvidia's.

        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.

        • wmf11 hours ago
          If it's that good Nvidia can just keep selling it.
        • allovertheworld6 hours ago
          more like now Nvidia wants to release their own ASIC to combat google
          • fragmede6 hours ago
            Umm... no one tell them, okay?
      • LoganDark11 hours ago
        For inference, but yes. Many hundreds of tokens per second of output is the norm, in my experience. I don't recall the prompt processing figures but I think it was somewhere in the low hundreds of tokens per second (so slightly slower than inference).
    • heavyset_go11 hours ago
      Nvidia just released their Nemotron models, and in my testing, they are the best performing models on low-end consumer hardware in both terms of speed and accuracy.
    • mr_toad2 hours ago
      The constant threat of open source (and other competitors) is what keeps the big fish from getting complacent. It’s why they’re spending trillions on new data centers, and that benefits Nvidia. When there’s an arms-race on it’s good to be an arms dealer.
    • karmasimida3 hours ago
      With RAM/memory price this high, open source is not going to catch up with closed source.

      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

    • vachina4 hours ago
      More like they’re trying to snuff out potential competitors. Why work as hard to push your own products if NVIDIA gave you money to retire for the rest of your life?
    • ymck12 hours ago
      I'd say that it's probably not a play against open source, but more trying to remove/change the bottlenecks in the current chip production cycle. Nvidia likely doesn't care who wins, they just want to sell their chips. They literally can't make enough to meet current demand. If they split off the inference business (and now own one of the only purchasable alternatives) they can spin up more production.

      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.

    • SkyPuncher12 hours 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.
    • ramoz10 hours ago
      They acquired in order to have an ASICs competitor to Google TPU.
    • nbardy2 hours ago
      Your way off, this reads more like anti capitalist political rhetoric than real reasoning.

      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.

    • matthewfcarlson13 hours 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.
    • __mharrison__12 hours ago
      How does this work considering the Nemotron models?
  • syntaxing14 hours ago
    I don’t see how this isn’t anti trust but knowing this political climate, this deal will go through.
    • mastax14 hours ago
      • nutjob213 hours ago
        An American Oligarchy.
      • exasperaited13 hours ago
        Good of them to make a list themselves, isn't it? It'll be useful in the future.
        • bdangubic13 hours 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?
          • exasperaited13 hours 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.

            • mrbungie12 hours ago
              Why is that relevant if there is no one willing to prosecute and convict?
              • wyre11 hours ago
                A forest can still exist despite people choosing to not see or look at it.
                • bdangubic11 hours ago
                  so corruption exists, that’s the pitch? learned something new today…
              • bdangubic12 hours ago
                it is completely irrelevant but people still waste internet bandwidth with nonsense :)
            • bdangubic12 hours ago
              whats the punishment for corruption (especially when you have 100’s of billions of dollars) I wonder…
            • nutjob212 hours ago
              If justice is served it'll be knocked down by the next admin, if it is ever built.
              • deaux5 hours ago
                Why would it have to take 4 years? It sure hasn't taken the current admin 4 years to disappear people into Salvadorian torture prisons.
                • moogly4 hours ago
                  Destroying things and outsourcing to already-built prisons is easy. Building things is not.

                  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...

                  • tormehan hour ago
                    Are you sure this is how he'll be remembered? Half the US thought him preferable to AOC and Hillary Clinton. It's hard to conclude in any other way than that the perception of his legacy will be equally divided.
        • zeryx11 hours ago
          The problem is, if everyone knows it going to curry favour and you're the odd man out - are you in Violation of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders?
    • jedberg6 hours ago
      > this deal will go through

      It should be noted that Don Jr. is one of the investors who will benefit greatly if/when this goes through.

    • dagmx12 hours ago
      It’ll go through. It’s not an acquisition, it’s an exclusive licensing deal. Same end result, but it lets them runaround the usual regulatory approvals for acquisitions.
    • 13 hours ago
      undefined
  • Daviey12 hours 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.

    • mkl8 hours ago
      I think your volume per bill should be 6.14 * 0.0254 * 2.61 * 0.0254 * 0.00011 ≈ 1.137e-6 m³. That means about 227 m³ total volume, or about 2800 wheelbarrows.
    • matwood2 hours ago
      The movie Blow had a scene about the logistics dealing with tons of cash. Even before thinking about laundering, it’s a huge PITA.
    • SauntSolaire9 hours ago
      Something wrong about representing the weight of US dollars in metric units.
      • mr_toad2 hours 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/

      • zaik5 hours ago
        They should have converted to Euros first.
      • blitzar2 hours ago
        How many pounds is it? Whos on first?
      • versteegen8 hours ago
        Then what do you say to 6.14" × 2.61" × 0.11 mm = 102 cm³
    • sgerenser8 hours ago
      I think you’re off by about a factor of 100 on the volume of a single bill. So both cases it’s in the ballpark of 2000 wheelbarrows.
    • ThrowawayTestr12 hours ago
      Your volume of a single bill is a bit off.
  • Sayyidalijufrian hour 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-exclusiv...

    https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...

    • woadwarrior01an hour 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

  • joelthelion3 hours ago
    What a disaster. Any little competition they have, they are going to buy out.

    The world needs much stronger anti trust laws.

    • PunchyHamster2 hours 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
  • fancyfredbot13 hours 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.

    • bri3d13 hours 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.
      • fancyfredbot12 hours ago
        That's an interesting take, it's plausible Nvidia wants to have an SRAM based product, but I am struggling to see why they would pay $20bn to have one /right now/. Even if DRAM prices make Groq's approach more economical, Nvidia can develop a competitive product before Groq could take any real market share.
        • bri3d12 hours ago
          Exactly. The only way this makes sense to me is if the board needed this product in <1 cycle. Which makes no sense for a market player like NV who already have the PDK, volume, and literally everything else in the universe. But here it is, so there is clearly a factor I have not considered :)
          • ece9 hours ago
            Would a Groq chiplet be worth $20B? If you bundle it while no one else can, maybe..
      • xgbi2 hours ago
        I want to subscribe to your AI wars news please!

        Joke aside, the strategic choices here and there hint at the blood lust of all other actors to dethrone Nvidia, it’s fascinating.

    • Imustaskforhelp12 hours ago
      But if all of these large companies create a monopoly where they realize that if they start undercutting each other or innovating too extremely then long term if Nvidia's stock decreases in value by a huge margin, the whole market itself can get down

      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.

    • arisAlexis13 hours ago
      And Cerebras
    • la6471013 hours ago
      Also Tsavorite scalable intelligence - their architecture seems to cover the broadest use cases and compatible with cuda
      • _zoltan_13 hours ago
        is this an ad? do you work there?

        I'm following the chip industry on a daily basis and never heard of them...

  • nusl14 hours 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_T13 hours 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.

      • zapnuk13 hours 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.

      • BoredPositron13 hours 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.
      • fatata12312 hours ago
        [dead]
    • cmrdporcupine9 hours ago
      That's unfortunately what most acquisitions are.
    • _zoltan_13 hours ago
      which is exactly what a business should do.

      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.

      • moffkalast12 hours ago
        In a normal world, this is where Nvidia gets trust busted. But that's long behind us now.
    • piskov13 hours ago
      Stuff like tinygrad will change this. Geohot already made nvidia run on macs via thunderbolt.

      Also: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983469817895198783

      • bri3d13 hours ago
        The bottleneck in training and inference isn’t matmul, and once a chip isn’t a kindergarten toy you don’t go from FPGA to tape out by clicking a button. For local memory he’s going to have to learn to either stack DRAM (not “3000 lines of verilog” and requires a supply chain which openai just destroyed) or diffuse block RAM / SRAM like Groq which is astronomically expensive bit for bit and torpedoes yields, compounding the issue. Then comes interconnect.
        • piskov12 hours ago
          The main point is that it will not be an nvidia’s monopoly for too long.
      • password5432113 hours ago
        This guy has the greatest dunning-kruger of all time. Lots of smoke and mirrors.
      • refulgentis13 hours ago
        There's this curious experience of people bringing up geohot / tinygrad and you can tell they've been sold into a personality cult.

        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)

        • piskov13 hours ago
          Can you show any other thing that runs nvidia gpu under m-series macs?
          • MrDarcy13 hours ago
            Who cares? Nobody is building large scale inference services with macs.
            • piskov12 hours ago
              Because this is exactly the demonstration of abstraction: the same stuff allows direct gpu communication so that even mac nvidia thing is possible.

              It is not tied to nvidia as well.

              This is the power of tinygrad

              • refulgentis11 hours ago
                My deepest apologies, I can't parse this and I earnestly tried: 5 minutes of my own thinking, then 3 llms, then a 10 minute timer of my own thinking over the whole thing.

                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")

                • piskov10 hours ago
                  > Compute Workload Test: This will be add soon

                  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

  • andrewinardeer13 hours ago
    Headline is incorrect.

    NVIDIA isn't buying Groq.

    It's a non exclusive deal for inference tech. Or am I reading it incorrectly?

    • hmate912 hours 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."
      • lerchmo12 hours 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?
        • wmf11 hours ago
          Shareholders get the $20B so that's the fiduciary responsibility fully satisfied.
    • davedunkin12 hours 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.

  • kodefreeze30 minutes ago
    They raised at a ~6B round recently. I could have invested but missed the deadline :(
  • supermatt4 hours 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.

    • mrdevlar3 hours 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.
  • yousif_12312312 hours 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.

    • aurareturn12 hours ago
      Groq is absolutely tiny. I don't think antitrust is an issue here.
    • nabla912 hours ago
      It's a non-exclusive deal.

      No reason for antitrust action whatsoever.

      • danny_codes10 hours ago
        That’s a loophole. Regulation hasn’t caught up to the innovation of non-exclusive licensing deal. Hopefully we’ll get some competence back in government soon-ish and can rectify the mistake
        • nabla9an hour ago
          That's not a loophole. Non-exclusive licensing agreement is the opposite of loophole.
      • siliconc0w11 hours ago
        It's a backdoor acquisition by looting the key talent.
    • frozenport8 hours ago
      >> if groq and cerebras combined

      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.

      • bubblethink8 hours ago
        They are both SRAM based solutions currently with the same benefits and pitfalls.
  • behnamoh14 hours 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.
    • archerx14 hours ago
      I literally said “oh no” out loud when I read the headline.
    • moneywoes13 hours ago
      was the API good
      • behnamoh12 hours ago
        fast but furiously expensive
        • Imustaskforhelp11 hours 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

          • highmastdon3 hours 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
  • maz1b14 hours ago
    Damn. Was hoping Groq and Cerebras would give the giants a run for their money.
    • tacitusarc13 hours ago
      There are others as well but NVidia is aggressive when it comes to punishing companies willing to buy non-NVidia products. As a result, they prefer to remain under the radar, at least until they have enough market leverage to be more widely known.
    • piskov13 hours ago
      There is still Modular
      • jampekka12 hours ago
        And China.
        • jimnotgym12 hours ago
          It would be interesting if it turned out that Chinese competition was the only thing that kept this market working!
          • Imustaskforhelp11 hours 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

            • SecretDreams9 hours ago
              > Nvidia/google/amd

              One of these things is not like the others

          • wyre11 hours 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.
        • anonzzzies12 hours ago
          Which China players are doing inference hardware? As indeed that is a good space for them.
    • 7e9 hours ago
      Yes, Groq failed. But there will be others.
    • cmrdporcupine9 hours ago
      I guess I have some hope for Tenstorrent
  • kreyenborgi14 hours ago
    There was an AMA here last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39429047
  • altpaddle13 hours 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
    • reissbaker13 hours 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.
      • blitzar2 hours 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.

    • sthuck13 hours 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

    • baq13 hours 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.
  • dwa359213 hours 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?

    • Aurornis9 hours ago
      Acquisition premium: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/acquisitionpremium.asp

      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.

    • ZiiS13 hours ago
      It only has to be overvalued by a lower multiple then NVidia; not undervalued.
    • dandanua12 hours ago
      • Imustaskforhelp11 hours 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.

    • frozenport6 hours ago
      Groq kept delivering so their valuation has effectively gone up.

      A year ago it wasn't clear if they'd stay competitive but it seems they are.

    • wmf13 hours 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.

    • bgwalter12 hours ago
      Trump Jr. entered at $7 billion. In the meantime Nvidia got permission to sell GPUs to China.

      All-In pundit Palihapitiya is invested in Groq as well. It is going well for friends of David Sacks.

  • richardw10 hours 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.

  • supermatt4 hours 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…

  • DebtDeflation14 hours ago
    Hopefully they plan to invest in the technology and not just eliminate a competitor.
    • mdasen13 hours 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.

  • roughly13 hours 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.)

    • jvanderbot13 hours ago
      NVIDIA and "no path to profitability" don't belong in the same zip code.
      • jonah13 hours ago
        I read it as path to profitability for the AI companies buying Nvidia's chips.
      • roughly13 hours 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.
    • wmf13 hours 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?

      • roughly11 hours ago
        Presuming that’s why they raised 3 times this year.
        • shwaj9 hours ago
          Inference being profitable doesn’t mean that they’re selling enough inference to offset their other costs.
  • siliconc0w13 hours 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.
  • mattas11 hours 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.

    • bgwalter9 hours 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.
      • tokioyoyo8 hours 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.
      • dustbunny9 hours ago
        What's your angle on the Chamath link? Is Nvidia greasing Sack's favour through Chamath?
  • fyrn_2 hours ago
    Seems anticompetitive..
  • Imustaskforhelp12 hours 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.

  • pinkmuffinere12 hours 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

    • cavisne12 hours ago
      I would assume this is a very well paid position, and with basically nothing to do.
      • lerchmo12 hours ago
        I would assume he is a fiduciary... I am curious what happens with investors here?
    • htrp12 hours ago
      He has to keep the company in business for 2 more years
      • pinkmuffinere11 hours ago
        Are there consequences if he fails to do so?
  • asdev14 hours ago
    Chamath is a bonafide scammer, but he makes good investments(gets good returns for himself)
    • yellow_lead14 hours ago
      He is good at scamming others
    • erichocean14 hours ago
      nVidia is being scammed here? Seems unlikely…
      • superkuh13 hours 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.
  • almosthere11 hours 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.
    • indigodaddy11 hours ago
      Can you list any internet facing apps you have that use Groq? Looking into them myself because of the speed
      • almosthere4 hours ago
        Still in development, but yes, the speed is absolutely nice.
  • sanxiyn11 hours 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.
  • skeptrune12 hours ago
    I hope non executives and founders get something for their equity.
  • nl12 hours 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!

    • shwaj9 hours 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)
      • nl8 hours 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.

  • niemandhier14 hours 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_arthur14 hours ago
      Implies they will pay cash value to equity holders as opposed to issuing NVDA shares.

      (Electronically)

      • SecretDreams13 hours ago
        Is this to somehow screw the employees with RSUs or what?
        • wmf13 hours 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.
          • SecretDreams12 hours 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_arthur12 hours 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.

            • wmf12 hours ago
              For vested RSUs it's likely that the Groq husk will pay out the $20B as a dividend or buyback or something. I don't know if unvested RSUs are accelerated or just canceled. Of course the employees will receive new RSUs when they join Nvidia.
    • lotsofpulp12 hours ago
      Unless one is worried about the government, no one ever means paper money.
    • diogenescynic14 hours ago
      It's the latter. They'll send a wire.
  • dustbunny9 hours ago
    Congratulations to Chamath
    • 7e9 hours ago
      For failing?
  • monster_truck12 hours 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.
  • z3ratul1630713 hours ago
    chamath made a killing
  • ryzvonusefan hour ago
    people on twitter are calling it yet another acqui-hire.
  • ilaksh11 hours 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.

  • moneywoes13 hours ago
    is this in response to the threat from Google tpu
  • nntwozz12 hours 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.

    • anonzzzies12 hours ago
      I thought the Skype deal back then was worse: it sucked balls back then already.
    • twoodfin11 hours ago
      And now we’re told that bet was such a sure thing that regulators should have blocked it!
  • kennethologist8 hours ago
    Big win for Chamath!
  • anonzzzies12 hours ago
    I do not consider this good news; I had hopes Anthropic or so would buy them, not the main AI hardware people.
  • moralestapia12 hours ago
    "2.7M Developers and Teams"

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

  • brcmthrowaway13 hours ago
    What are the other top AI silicon vendors?

    Graphcore

    Tenstorrent

    SambaNova

    Rivos

  • boroboro412 hours 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.

    • slrainka9 hours 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.
    • laidoffamazon10 hours ago
      It's not a conspiracy theory. It's basically a bribe to Chamath, Don Jr. and Sacks.
  • exceptione13 hours ago
    Following the age old playbook of monopolies. 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.

    • incrudible9 hours 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.
      • exceptione3 hours 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.

  • 13 hours ago
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  • why-o-why13 hours 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".

    • 12 hours ago
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  • nowittyusername13 hours ago
    This is the most blatant buy the competition move if i've ever seen one....
  • justinai66 hours 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.

  • jauntywundrkind12 hours 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.

  • MuffinFlavored13 hours ago
    Is any part of this because Google has the TPU and Groq has the LPU?
    • wmf13 hours 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.
  • erichocean14 hours ago
    Well that sucks.
  • scratchyone14 hours 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?
    • wmf13 hours ago
      It may be more likely that Nvidia sells the LPUv2 at a price that doesn't threaten Rubin.
    • pohl13 hours ago
      Zero. Non-zero only if someone says something deemed “woke”.
  • rvz14 hours ago
    Great choice and what a great deal.

    Quite obvious that Groq would get acquired. [0]

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438820

  • throwup23814 hours 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?

    • jimmySixDOF3 minutes ago
      The business model at Groq basically morphed over time so the internal cloud was their only client and all purchases were on some revenue sharing basis to finance set up and operate the cloud business. So this has a bigger impact on those Cloud hardware operators to the extent they were involved in the discussions with Nvidia. Saudi Aramco comes to mind, as an early big check investor, who hosts much of the Groq Cloud today. So now Nvidia is their sole source supplier and the whole Tokens-as-a-Service business model they signed up for is re-negotiated ?
    • onion2k14 hours 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.

    • ChristianJacobs14 hours ago
      That's the neat trick - it isn't...
      • garyfirestorm14 hours ago
        Sell the asset and then lease it from the buyer.
        • throwup23814 hours 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.
    • fancyfredbot13 hours 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.

  • nextworddev14 hours ago
    They should have bought nbis
  • julienfr11214 hours ago
    How can this pass antitrust régulation ?
    • rvz14 hours ago
      There is no "antitrust regulation" in the US in 2025. (Until 2029)

      States are "not allowed" to regulate AI companies.

      • sunaookami14 hours ago
        There also weren't any antitrust regulations before, let's not kid ourselves.
        • calmbell14 hours ago
          There was an attempt under Lina Khan.
        • kergonath11 hours ago
          The regulations are still in place. They are not enforced, however.
      • ronyfadel14 hours ago
        Care to give more details?
    • agency14 hours 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.
      • bonesss13 hours ago
        They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm…
        • quesera10 hours 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.

    • 14 hours ago
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    • bigyabai14 hours ago
      I doubt Nvidia will be regulated in their home jurisdiction. America tends to protect it's cash cows, for better or worse.
  • yoan922413 hours 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
  • Caius-Cosades14 hours ago
    Nvidia. Please stop. Just stop it already.
  • xvector13 hours ago
    Put Groq and Nvidia execs in prison, blatant anti-trust.
  • wetpaws3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • thehamkercat13 hours ago
    Next they would acquire and kill Cerebras. I hate every part of Nvidia
  • asdfsfds13 hours ago
    That's great, but LLMs are still not generating revenue.
    • irl_zebra13 hours ago
      I pay $20/mo for Gemini, so they're generating at least that much in revenue!
      • SecretDreams13 hours 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.
    • 13 hours ago
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    • SonOfKyuss13 hours ago
      They’re generating tons of revenue, just not necessarily profits
    • latchkey13 hours ago
      They are generating revenue, profit is the dubious thing.
  • NaOH13 hours 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 - 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)

    • iamacyborg13 hours ago
      From $6.9b to 20 in a few months, not bad…
      • koakuma-chan13 hours ago
        Almost as good as forking VSCode, impressive.
        • Imustaskforhelp11 hours 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.

      • Aurornis9 hours 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.