Even if regulators did somehow unwind the $20B deal, there's a growing list of alternatives ready to take Groq's place, no merger required
Nvidia spent a whopping $20 billion late last year to license Groq’s AI accelerator tech and hire away key members of its engineering team in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink deal.The acquihire technically left Groq’s core inference-as-a-service business intact, but was clearly architected in such a way as to fly under regulators' radar. Only it didn’t.
This week, The New York Times reported that the US Department of Justice had launched an antitrust probe into the deal.
It’s hard to argue that Nvidia didn’t strip the startup for parts. It may not have been a merger in the traditional sense, but without its engineering staff, Groq may as well be Nvidia’s puppet at this point.Despite this, Nvidia contends the deal is a great American success story. “The Groq story is a prime example of the American system working as designed to promote innovation, reward entrepreneurs, and benefit consumers. The law is designed to encourage America's startup ecosystem and promote the fundamental rights of inventors and workers to pursue their dreams,” an Nvidia statement provided to El Reg and other media reads. Whether the acquihire of Groq actually harmed competition is another matter entirely. But, even if the Justice Department did force Nvidia to unwind the team, it’s probably too late.What exactly did Nvidia buy?Nvidia’s Groq acquihire bought it two key assets: mature silicon and the talent necessary to continue its development.Groq – which, by the way, is completely unrelated to Elon Musk’s Grok model series – made a name for itself using SRAM-heavy dataflow accelerators to speed up LLM inference to hundreds and now thousands of tokens a second, something that GPU-based systems from Nvidia had struggled to do on their own.But while faster than GPUs, the accelerators couldn’t achieve rapid throughput. Think of it this way: If Groq’s LPUs were the F1 cars, Nvidia’s GPUs were more like a city bus. But combine the two and you get something more akin to a sport pickup.
