Nvidia's $20 billion deal to license Groq's AI accelerator technology and hire its key engineers has drawn a DOJ antitrust probe, with critics arguing it was deliberately structured to avoid regulatory scrutiny while effectively gutting the startup. The deal gave Nvidia access to Groq's SRAM-based accelerators, which complement its GPUs for AI inference tasks, though similar disaggregated computing architectures are already being developed by rivals like Cerebras, SambaNova, and AMD. Even if the DOJ successfully unwinds the deal, the impact may be limited, as Nvidia has already built a broader ecosystem through open rack designs and its NVLink Fusion licensing programme that would allow Groq or others to continue as hardware partners regardless.
