Free Nvidia's $20b Antitrust Loophole 2025
"You're taking on a giant. What gives you the audacity?"
On November 5th, 2025, Groq CEO Jonathan Ross was asked why he was even bothering to challenge Nvidia. He didn't blink:
"I think that was a polite way to ask why in the world are we competing with Nvidia, so we're not. Competition is a waste of money; competition fundamentally means you are taking something someone else is doing and trying to copy it. You're wasting R&D dollars trying to do the exact same thing they've done instead of using them to differentiate."
49 days later, Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq's assets and hired Ross along with his entire executive team.
Except this wasn't actually an acquisition, at least not in the traditional sense. Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq's IP and people, but explicitly did NOT buy the company. Jensen Huang's statement was surgical: "While we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq's IP, we are not acquiring Groq as a company."
That phrasing is the entire story. Because what Nvidia carved out of the deal tells you everything about why this happened.
Forget the AI doomer takes about a bubble forming, lets look into the actual reasons.
GroqCloud continues as an independent company under CFO Simon Edwards. This is Nvidia's largest acquisition ever (previous record was Mellanox at $7B in 2019), and they structured it to leave the actual operating business behind. That doesn't happen by accident.
To understand why Nvidia paid anything for Groq, you need to understand the architectural bet Ross made when he left Google.
CPUs and GPUs are built around external DRAM/HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). Every compute operation requires shuttling data between the processor and off-chip memory. This works fine for general-purpose computing, but for inference workloads, that constant round-trip creates latency and energy overhead. GPUs evolved from graphics rendering, so they're optimized for parallel training workloads, not sequential inference.
Source: HackerNews
