alt Hacker News> 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.
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.