Nvidia hollowed out Groq. Here's what happened to the company left behind.

Following Nvidia's roughly $20 billion deal last December to license Groq's AI chip architecture and hire its key leadership—including founder Jonathan Ross—Groq has restructured itself into an independent $3.5 billion AI cloud infrastructure provider. The transaction stripped Groq of most of its hardware and software engineering talent, prompting customer transition challenges, but left the entity with 13 data centers and $1 billion in fresh capital to expand compute capacity. In a notable strategic pivot, Groq is now increasingly refitting its data centers with Nvidia systems to power its GroqCloud platform for 6 million developers. While the deal drew scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding antitrust compliance, the arrangement solidified Nvidia's competitive moat in the rapidly expanding AI inference hardware market by absorbing top-tier IP and talent while transforming a former hardware rival into a customer.