I would guess their interconnect technology is what NVIDIA wants. You need something like 75 adapters for an 8b parameter model they had some really interesting tech to make the accelerator to accelerator communication work and scale. They were able to do that well before nvl 72 and they scale to hundreds of adapters since large models require more adapters still.
We will know in a few months.
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 added that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO.
Inference hardware company
Your words.
Because it's very good tech for inference?
It doesn't even do training.
And most inference providers for Open Source models use NVIDIA eg Fireworks, Basten, TogetherAI etc.
Most NVIDIA sales go to training clusters. That is changing but it'd be an interesting strategy to differentiate the training and inference lines.
Almost all open source models are trained and mostly run on NVIDIA hardware.
Open source is great for NVIDIA. They want more open source, not less.
Commoditize your complement is business 101.