The most bizarre thing here is the reporters. They intentionally misrepresented what happened. All the news stories from last year claimed Nvidia "acquired" Groq - and in the same story, quoted what actually happened, and pretended it didn't. It's like the journalists had some kind of group psychosis, pretending it was an acquisition. It wasn't. It was a really white-glove product rental.

From the actual Groq PR release:

"Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia" - "As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other members of the Groq team will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology" - "Groq will continue to operate as an independent company with Simon Edwards stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer" (https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv...)

Nothing about an acquisition there. It says Nvidia is licensing it, and that others can too. The execs work for Nvidia to integrate it into Nvidia's... something. And Groq the company remains the same as before.

There's also no official source for the amount Nvidia paid for the tech, or two unofficial ones. Journalistically speaking, this is some bullshit.

Why's the deal like this? No idea. Does it make sense? No idea. But it's not odd that Groq is continuing to raise more money, because they never stopped being a normally operating company.

If you want an explanation for why Nvidia would do this deal, my best offer is here (https://openrouter.ai/rankings): Of the top 10 fastest AI models, Groq is the provider of 4 of them. And of the price of those top 10 fastest AI models, Groq is #1, #2, #3, and #5. And you wonder why someone's giving them a measly half billion dollars? They're the fastest cheapest thing on the market. If you don't understand the value of that, you really don't understand AI.