A few thoughts: [disclaimer - I don't know anything official at all just reading the same public info that has been officially shared - this is just a few thoughts from an outsider]
- The deal structure matters, and we don't have enough details yet.
- If the license fee is distributed to shareholders, it goes above the liquidation preference. Anyone with common stock or options can exercise and get paid out.
- The company continuing forward—I see this as great. There are discussions about it becoming just a shell, but I don't think that's the case at all. This looks like an acqui-hire for a few top people and a licensing deal for an alternative hardware approach to inference.
Let's say they keep $3–4B cash in the company. That's plenty to avoid another financing round and keep cranking on growth.
Groq and Cerebras can keep adding speed to open models while giving Nvidia key IP they can integrate into their large data center buildouts.
Also, on deal points I think could be interesting: would you negotiate this as a one-time payment license deal? I wouldn't. Maybe it's a hurdle, so it might take a while, but let's say Nvidia pushes massive investment to deploy this Groq hardware infrastructure integrated into their full stack…
A. This could produce a nice royalty stream for the Groq company that still exists—benefiting all stakeholders.
B. Use Nvidia's massive ability to deploy capital and hardware pipeline and add in another unit they can sell to their fat stakes customers and ultimately to cheapen and accelerate getting fast inference in the wild quickly.
And lastly, if management is smart or clever with the distribution part of this deal, maybe they convert all stock to common and squash the liquidation preference in this move. so they might have a quite compelling cap table post deal. (again hopefully structured as a distribution vs buy out) but at least pref is gone.
So employees exercise, get an exit, keep their stock—with investors already happy, liquidation preference gone, and potentially a well-capitalized future royalty stream coming from the largest market cap company in the world and the largest capex pipeline ever seen.
I'd much rather own the actual shares (fewer handcuffs) and have plenty of cash to deploy in a very capex-heavy moment.
It just seems like a win-win-win-win.
Nvidia wins new fundamentally different IP can sell to there existing customers
Groq employees and stakeholders win.
The open models win (big).
We as AI consumers win because of cheaper, faster inference.
Common to what we all want to believe here, we’re not really in a winner take all moment here.
nvdia is just taking a disproportional amount because of lack of real suitable alternatives… The base will for sure widen and expand from where we are at now, but that doesn’t mean that nvidia has to or is going or loose as part of it.