The part I don’t fully understand is: could this non-acquisition eventually make the deal less than ideal for Nvidia?

Is it really a given that GroqCloud is going to be sunset and the company will die?

Couldn’t this company hire talent and continue to operate and maybe even innovate? Couldn’t Groq even hire back some employees from Nvidia? If any of them live in California there’s nothing stopping them and they have a bunch of cash from Nvidia. There are all kinds of loopholes for that like contracting arrangements.

Nvidia doesn’t really have exclusive access to any part of the company. They didn’t necessarily remove a competitor, though I’ll grant that they likely did in practice.

It’s potentially possible that the regulations did their job and kept a competitor on the market, though again I imagine this is my naevity speaking and that the most likely outcome is that Groq will wither.

I also don’t fully understand if the Saudis are getting cashed out or not. Are they really going to roll over and allow their Saudi AI data center to become worthless? I would think they have a lot of motivation after this deal to make sure Groq still operates and serves their goals.