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Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

cnbc.com

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Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#241

Post by Aurornis »

dwa3592 wrote: post #57

This doesn't make much sense- In September, Groq was valued at $7B. How is it that in 4 months it is being bought for $20B? Can someone with better understanding dumb this down for me please?

Acquisition premium: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/acquisitionpremium.asp

The acquisition price of a company usually comes at a premium to the last valuation. This applies even with publicly traded companies, which is why acquisition announcements cause stock prices to pop up to some number between the last trade price and the acquisition price, proportional to how much the market thinks the acquisition is likely to go through.

The premium can make sense to the acquirer because the acquired company is worth more when combined with all of the assets and power (brand name, distribution, patents, trade secrets) of the acquiring company.

This confuses a lot of people who think the valuation of a company is equivalent to the number that would be paid to acquire it at that instant, but it’s not.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#244

Post by gejose »

impulser_ wrote: post #127
Workaccount2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shy of an algo breakthrough, open source isn't going to catch up with SOTA, their main trick for model improvement is distilling the SOTA models. That's why they they have perpetually been "right behind".

They don't need to catch up. They just need to be good enough and fast as fuck. Vast majority of useful tasks of LLMs has nothing to do with how smart they are. GPT-5 models have been the most useless models out of any model released this year despite being SOTA, and it because it slow as fuck.

> just need to be good enough and fast as fuck

Hard disagree. There are very few scenarios where I'd pick speed (quantity) over intelligence (quality) for anything remotely to do with building systems.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#245

Post by credit_guy »

wmf wrote: post #194
credit_guy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From the article:

  > Groq added that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO.
The $20B does not go to Groq's investors. It goes to Groq. You can say that Groq is owned by its investors, and this is the same thing, but it's not. In order for the money to go to the investors, Groq needs to disburse a dividend, or to buy back shares. There is no indication that this will happen. And what's more, the investors don't even need this to happen. I'm sure any investor that wants to sell their shares in Groq will now find plenty of buyers at a very advantageous price.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#246

Post by frozenport »

yousif_123123 wrote: post #115

Not good. This shouldn't be allowed. What would be better is if groq and cerebras combined, and maybe other companies invested in them to help them scale. Why would the major cloud providers not lobby against this? Usually antitrust is for consumers, but here I think companies like Microsoft and AWS would be the biggest beneficiaries of having more AI chip competition.

>> if groq and cerebras combined

There isn't to be shared between the two techs, Groq's hardware is a like a railgun that installs all the weights into the optimal location before firing off an inference. Cerebras computer engineering more convention requiring the same data movement that GPUs struggle with optimizing.

Suspect Groq is complementary/superior to nvidia's GPUs, while it is unclear what Cerebras brings other then maybe some deals with TSMC.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#248

Post by jameshush »

gejose wrote: post #244
impulser_ wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to catch up. They just need to be good enough and fast as fuck. Vast majority of useful tasks of LLMs has nothing to do with how smart they are. GPT-5 models have been the most useless models out of any model released this year despite being SOTA, and it because it slow as fuck.

> just need to be good enough and fast as fuck Hard disagree. There are very few scenarios where I'd pick speed (quantity) over intelligence (quality) for anything remotely to do with building systems.

I agree with you for many use cases, but for the use case I'm focused on (Voice AI) speed is absolutely everything. Every millisecond counts for voice, and most voice use cases don't require anything close to "deep thinking. E.g., for inbound customer support use cases, we really just want the voice agent to be fast and follow the SOP.

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#249

Post by versteegen »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #235
Daviey wrote: post #119

I got curious about how many wheelbarrows of cash $20bn actually is. Two ways to think about it: weight vs volume. By weight (assuming all $100 bills): $20,000,000,000 / $100 = 200,000,000 bills Each bill is roughly 1g, so total mass is ~200,000 kg A typical builder’s wheelbarrow can take about 100 kg before it becomes unmanageable 200,000 kg total / 100 kg per wheelbarrow ≈ 2,000 wheelbarrows (weight limit) By volum…

Something wrong about representing the weight of US dollars in metric units.

Then what do you say to 6.14" × 2.61" × 0.11 mm = 102 cm³

Re: Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

#250

Post by sgerenser »

Daviey wrote: post #119

I got curious about how many wheelbarrows of cash $20bn actually is. Two ways to think about it: weight vs volume. By weight (assuming all $100 bills): $20,000,000,000 / $100 = 200,000,000 bills Each bill is roughly 1g, so total mass is ~200,000 kg A typical builder’s wheelbarrow can take about 100 kg before it becomes unmanageable 200,000 kg total / 100 kg per wheelbarrow ≈ 2,000 wheelbarrows (weight limit) By volum…

I think you’re off by about a factor of 100 on the volume of a single bill. So both cases it’s in the ballpark of 2000 wheelbarrows.
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