"Nvidia's move was stranger still. On Christmas Eve, it announced a "non-exclusive licensing agreement" with Groq, the startup behind custom chips designed to handle AI inference - the real-time work that powers chatbot replies. The companies did not disclose financial terms. While Nvidia didn't call it an acquisition, the guts of the arrangement looked familiar. Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, along with top engineering staff, will head to Nvidia."
"That's the vibe of 2025: big, hairy deals that refuse to stay inside the lines. The industry's biggest moves weren't just splashy acquisitions or eye-watering funding rounds. ( We saw those deals, too.) They were sprawling, hard-to-categorize transactions. Money came tied to compute. Licensing came paired with talent raids. Infrastructure deals locked governments and corporate America into yearslong dependencies. These weren't neat mergers or simple checks."
Nvidia and SoftBank executed major deals during the holiday period, including SoftBank's acquisition of DigitalBridge for about $4 billion. Nvidia struck a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq that transfers Groq's founder Jonathan Ross and top engineering staff to Nvidia while leaving the startup nominally independent. Groq was valued at $6.9 billion three months earlier. Deal structures increasingly combined licensing, talent transfers, compute commitments, and long-term infrastructure dependencies. Founders and key engineers are being absorbed, technologies siphoned away, and startups left in uncertain positions. These complex, sprawling transactions reshaped power dynamics across AI, infrastructure, and corporate-government relationships in 2025.
Read at Business Insider
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