The community support forum is also getting retired and there haven't been any posts by support employees in forever anyway, so they are probably gone, too. Also, the number of issues have been piling up, suggesting that the developers are gone as well. https://community.groq.com/c/forum/4 (archive link for when it goes down https://web.archive.org/web/20260602064050/https://community...)
To me, it looks they are trying to raise 650M with a few remaining (ancient) LPUs and no employees.
On the bright side it looks like Cerebras might be serving Kimi K2.6 at 1000tok/s soon https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/cerebras-kimi-k2-Enterprise
I'm also looking forward for the Cerebras Kimi K2.6 release, which should be even better at 1000 tps. It is hard to overstate how important speed is for programming. Instead of having to wait for a few minutes until a task is done, it is just done instantly, and you don't have to context switch from whatever else you were working on while waiting.
I hope they will make it available to regular customers.
Cerebras also seems to be killing off their regular APIs, they're deprecating models and GLM is still stuck on GLM 4.7, a whole 2 versions behind.
Thanks for the tip, looks fire.
This model will run on any laptop with 128GB RAM, wow.
That being said, there's still a chance that NVIDIA engineering is in the process of stripping it for parts. Or the lawyers are - maybe they have too much momentum with GPUs and just want ASICs out of the market.
This kind of innovation stifling acquisition should have been blocked. NVIDIA is a serious monopoly threat.
The whole thing never made any sense to me - but I guess AI hype is a thing.
That doesn’t match my experience or the numbers:
Plausibly, take all the Nvidia hype and multiply that by a factor and that's what 'Groq' could be worth.
And there is no real commodification - there's Nvidia, Cerebras, Groq ... not many otheres.
They're not really competing with Nvidia because 1) Nvidia owns their chips now, and 2) Nvidia is not really an inference provider.
Nvidia doesn't own them or all their IP now, we don't quite know the terms of the deal.
Was this comment created using quantized llama 3?
I love Groq, but across every single line break in your post there is a glaring issue that is easy to refute with in 15 seconds, even without 300t/s of throughput.
Groq is more performant for the growing categories of inference-based tasks, wherein Nvidia's advantage in inference depends bulk/batch processing which will make up a smaller category over time, in relative terms.
The future of AI Silicon is inference, and the cost structure of AI data centres is constrained around the current necessity to have 'high GPU utilization' otherwise, the cost / amortization of the chips doesn't work out.
That cost structure is a limitation of Nvidia architecture.
Groq serves a lot faster, and without the limiting batching requirement, which opens hosting arrangements common in most classical hosting scenarios aka without necessarily the high utilization requirements.
Groq has bespoke hardware, lack of CUDA, much lower memory desnsity obviously and they don't have the deep distribution networks and leverage over TSMC that Nvidia has - but pound for pound, were we to be able to 'fire up a server' for our inference needs, it would be Groq, not Nvidia that we'd turn to.
Were they not a later market entrant and didn't have those barriers to entry, they'd be gigantic.
Google's eight generation TPU inference chip has 384 MB of on-chip SRAM vs 500 MB for Groq's third generation LPU.
> Groq, the AI chip company company that was acquired by Nvidia in December of last year, is raising $650M
? Could you provide details?
I'd say they have a "Tier 2" inference stack, but that'd be Apple Silicon and AMD: their well below that.
In part because unlike those, no one can get their hands on the hardware, so they miss out on a massive amount of free development, testing, etc.
At this point there's years of complaints about open weight models performing worse on their platform, tool calling makes it especially easy to tell since it's so sensitive to these issues.
The new designs were their main asset besides the amazing talent that went to NVIDIA, not the remaining DCs.
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.
Did you honestly believe that this kind of deal doesn't leave a trace in financial disclosures?
The February 2026 Nvidia 10-K has this:
Cash flows from investing activities: Groq. -$13B.
And this: "Total consideration consists of $13.0 billion paid at closing and $4 billion, inclusive of imputed interest, payable within one year included in Accrued and Other Current Liabilities on our Consolidated Balance Sheets."
-- allam-2-7b
-- canopylabs/orpheus-arabic-saudi
-- canopylabs/orpheus-v1-english
-- groq/compound
-- groq/compound-mini
-- llama-3.1-8b-instant
-- llama-3.3-70b-versatile
-- meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct
-- meta-llama/llama-prompt-guard-2-22m
-- meta-llama/llama-prompt-guard-2-86m
-- openai/gpt-oss-120b
-- openai/gpt-oss-20b
-- openai/gpt-oss-safeguard-20b
-- qwen/qwen3-32b
-- whisper-large-v3
-- whisper-large-v3-turbo
“Existing shareholders will receive the remaining cash distributions and then have the opportunity to invest into a new company”
New company? But Groq still exists and continued to exist.
“The bottom line: Don't be surprised if this becomes a new transaction template in the AI private markets.”
A transaction template? I don’t follow what was novel about this situation. The Meta not-acquisition-acquisition of Scale seems more novel.
I guess I feel like Zach’s confusion is because of the way Axios has presented what is happening to Groq. Looking at why actually happened with Groq, it seems like Axios are reporting it weird.
Unless Groq really is starting a new company in which case I am equally as confused.
edit: when announced last year it was announced as an asset acquisition https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startu...
Rather, the interesting thing and the topic of most of the article is "how, after Nvidia hired most of Groq's team and licensed all their IP, did Groq manage to convince investors to invest in the remaining corporate entity?"
“One could argue that Groq’s datacenters alone could make them worth billions of dollars.”
Groq is a successful datacenter business with a high-revenue cloud product. That’s a compelling investment in its own right, right?
https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-launches-european-data-center...
That sounds like they are renting racks in a Equinix data centre. Do Groq have 4 data centers worth billions?
These 'we get your executives' type of deals - aka Windsurf - are new, weird thing in M&A.
HN takes a stand against a number of practices, including ideological battle, despite the fact that this often creates a de facto status quo bias. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.
That includes as well snarky or curmudgeonly comments, namecalling (e.g., "mental illness"), and sneering ("Simple" might be read that way). Absent those two elements your comment would have been far stronger. Additional substantive points would also help.
A key issue of course is that problems which are addressed, in part or in whole, by mass organisation or movements, tend to rely heavily on rhetorical rather than dialectical speech. By nature this tends not to reflect intellectual curiosity.
This doesn't mean you cannot criticise posts or comments, or challenge the status quo. But you should be intelligent in how you do so. Yes, that takes more work and is tiresome itself. It may be effective, however, and tends to keep the mods off your back. And it may help you refine your arguments (and rhetoric) for taking the fight elsewhere. In that regard, HN can be a useful training / testing ground.
The establishment / status quo rhetoric nearly always gets a pass. That is IMO quite wrong and a major bone of contention with HN's moderation policies, though I understand why they exist and note that they work well in many other areas.
FWIW, the same admonishments also apply against brain-dead endorsement of the status quo (e.g., tired thought-stopping cliches, whataboutism, JAQing off, Gish gallops, etc.), and comments which do this are rightfully downvoted or flagged.
Oh, and you might find this thread of interest: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371592>.
If you want nuance, the obvious answer to this is that the rules that apply at our level do not apply to them. Raising money is an inevitability and does not require any fundamental basis other than the name behind it.