Tech Brew Ride Home - Nvidia Kindacquires Groq

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Nvidia kindaquires Groq I’ll tell you what we think the strategy is here. A shot across my bow that CES is next week. Accountants shut down remote testing because of AI. And for all the recent bullishness, an honest look at the immediate limitations of today’s robotics. Nvidia Reaches Technology Licensing Deal With Startup Groq (Bloomberg) Why Nvidia Struck a $20 Billion Megadeal with Groq (The Information) Samsung brings Google Photos to the biggest screen in your home (AndroidPolice) Accounting body scraps remote exams to combat cheating (Financial Times) Even the Companies Making Humanoid Robots Think They’re Overhyped (WSJ) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Monday, December 29th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Invidia kind acquires GROC. I'll tell you what we think the strategy is there. A shot across my bow that CES is next week. Accountants shut down remote testing because of AI. And for all the recent foolishness and honest look at the immediate limitations of today's robotics.

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IT and security teams can spot risk before it becomes a finding. Learn more at yesh ID.com slash tech brew. That's Y-E-S-H-I-D.com slash tech brew. Well, the biggest news we missed over the last few days was the fact that it happened again. Another big acquisition in all but name. NVIDIA has agreed to a licensing deal, in quotes, with GROC. GROC CEO Jonathan Ross and other top executives will join NVIDIA. In fact, sources say around 90% of GROC's employees will be joining NVIDIA. GROC nonetheless says it will continue operating independently, quoting Bloomberg.

The world's largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use GROC's technology and will integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the startup's executives are leaving to join NVIDIA to help with that effort, the company said. GROC will continue as an independent company with a new chief executive. said, GROC is among the startups and companies such as Google that are developing their own AI chips to rival NVIDIAs. The startup, which was founded in 2016, raised $750 million at a post-funding valuation of $6.9 billion in September. At the time, GROC said it would

use the funds to expand its data center capacity. Its data center business, which offers outsource computing, will continue, the company said in the post. GROC chief executive officer Jonathan Ross is a former Google chip executive who helped start that company's tensor processing unit or TPU, which powers AI workloads. As part of the deal, he and other top executives will join NVIDIA, quote, to help advance and scale the license technology, GROC said in the statement. GROC's low latency chips are extremely responsive to inputs and will add new capabilities to NVIDIA's products and open up new areas of the market, NVIDIA said. Under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Jensen Wong, the chipmaker has added a myriad of new

offerings aimed at cementing its position and speeding up the rate at which companies find a use for its AI software and hardware. The company now sells networking software and services, as well as complete computers. The licensing deal is similar in some ways to a partnership meta reached with data labeling startup scale AI, in which the big tech company made a sizable investment in the smaller firm, licensed technology, and hired its CEO. By incorporating a new type of design into what itself, Nvidia is showing willingness to be flexible and add novel capabilities. That approach is likely aimed at keeping its biggest customers and new adopters focused on its technology at a time when in-house efforts from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are gaining momentum as the industry rushes to

install as much computing capacity as quickly as it can, end quote. Sources say this deal with GROC, which has raised around $1.8 billion lifetime, includes payouts to GROC's key executives and investors, including BlackRock and Tiger Global, Most shareholders will apparently be getting per share payouts at a $20 billion valuation, while Grok employees will be paid cash for all of their vested shares. Quoting the information, the licensing arrangement gives Nvidia access to GROC's intellectual property, which the startup says can produce chips that process data faster for specific tasks involving AI apps. Invita's chips are much larger and take longer to process data,

but the chips also have more flexibility to handle different types of operations. GROC's chips aimed to keep data on the processor itself through a type of computer memory known as static random access memory, minimizing the need to shuttle data back and forth to separate high bandwidth memory chips. NVIDIA chips also use S-RAM, but rely more heavily on HBM chips to support large AI models. That reliance exposes NVIDIA to a memory supply chain controlled by a handful of firms. GROC was started in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, who worked on an early version of Google's in-house AI-JU. chips later known as tensor processing units. GROC started a cloud business last year that let small developers run open source AI models using its chips called language processing units. That business will remain at GROC following the deal with NVIDIA, GROC said Wednesday.

GROC recently cut its 2025 revenue projections by about three quarters. A GROC spokesperson at the time said the company shifted some revenue projections to next year because of a lack of data center capacity in a region where it planned to install more chips. In July, Grock projected the cloud business would make more than $40 million of revenue this year and projected more than $500 million in overall sales, end quote. But let's take a step back. What is the overall strategy behind all of this? Well, Gavin Baker on X says that as inference splits into pre-fill and decode, NVIDIA's GROC deal could enable a Ruben S-RAM variant optimized for ultra-low latency, agentic reasoning workloads. Quote, number one, inference is disaggregating into pre-fill and decode.

S-RAM architectures have unique advantages in decode for workloads where performance is primarily a function of memory bandwidth. Number two, it has been clear for some time that S-Ram architectures can hit token-per-second metrics much higher than GPUs, TPUs, or any ASIC that we have used. yet seen. Extremely low latency per individual user at the expense of throughput per dollar. It was less clear 18 months ago whether end users were willing to pay for this speed, SRAM more expensive per token due to much smaller batch sizes, but it is now abundantly clear from Cerebrus and GROC's recent results that users are willing to pay for speed, which increases my confidence that all A6 except TPU, AI5, and Traneum will eventually be cancelled. Good luck competing with the three Rubin variants and multiple associated networking chips, although let's see what AMD does. Intel is already moving in this

direction. They have a pre-fill optimized skew and purchased Samba Nova, which was the weakest S-RAM competitor. Kind of funny that MetaBot Rivas. And Cerebrus, where I am biased, of course, is now in a very interesting and highly strategic position as the last, per public knowledge, independent S-RAM player that was ahead of GROC on all public benchmarks. GROC's mini-chip rack architecture, however, was much easier to integrate with NVIDIA's networking stack and perhaps even within a single rack, while Cerebrus's WSC almost has to be an independent rack, end quote. And then here is our good friend M.G. Siegler, quote, the key part of this deal was clearly to bring CEO Jonathan Ross on board.

And every story also points to company president, Sunny Madra, being crucial as well. But beyond that, it sounds like Nvidia may actually care about some of the IP rights here, which they're presumably getting a license to with their, quote, non-exclusive licensing agreement to be able to leverage GROC's techniques in would-be future chips. In that way, non-exclusive feels less important here. That's another framing to make it seem less like an acquisition, but is anyone else really getting access to this IP now? Regardless, Nvidia probably feels confident that with Ross and Madra, not to mention their own in-house prowess, they'll be able to implement it and execute upon it far better than anyone else,

and they're undoubtedly not wrong. And that points to another layer to this as well. Ross is not just a co-founder of Grock. He's also the creator of the TPU, something which he cites in his own bio. You may recall the TPU was last a part of a major news cycle when Jensen Wong was, quote, delighted about Google's success with their AI chips. How do I know that NVIDIA is not actually so delighted about Google's success here? And is in fact sweating the rise of the TPU? Well, this deal for one. Invidia is paying $20 billion to grab some talent and license some tech. $20 billion. It's one of the largest deals of any sort in the history of deals, and they're technically

acquiring nothing. Granted, GROX's technology and first batch of chips have been divisive in the industry. Some seem certain they're the future of inference. Others aren't sure they're the future of anything. Maybe Nvidia is fully bought in on the former, or maybe they simply want to access to the key talent that created the TPU, and importantly, to keep them away from anyone else who might might try to make their own XPUs. Many are trying, of course, but only Google has really found some level of success thus

far. But that level of success has seen them not only train their own state-of-the-art models to rival any of those trained on Nvidia chips, but also now growing talk about how much more efficient the TPU is versus the GPU. In an era of growing energy fears, this is potentially a real problem for Nvidia, to the point where they probably need to have their own TPU-like option, even if they remain fully committed to their GPUs as being the bigger and better option. certainly they need to counter this narrative on the inference side, and again, that's where

Grock was focused. Maybe their chips were legit. Maybe they weren't, or maybe they weren't yet, but even $20 billion is a relatively small price to effectively lock this team in and this tech up. Invidia made $32 billion in profit last quarter. This potentially helps them protect those profits. Speaking of, one can't help but wonder if this isn't the acquisition that breaks the regulators back, as it were. They've looked into these deals before and largely haven't pursued them, but this is a situation where a regular acquisition between Nvidia and GROC almost certainly would have been blocked simply because Nvidia controls over 90% of the AI chip market. So what will regulators do here? Certainly, it seems smart of Jensen to try this under the current administration

versus any other. It's a group that keeps trying to help him out with China for a fee, naturally, even if China continues to be a problem on their end. Regardless, and this remains a key, to these acquisitions. InVidia will get access to GROC and their team fast with this structure. Will anyone even remember the $20 billion deal after the holidays? Nothing like some last-minute Christmas shopping, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs.

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The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go. and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN. Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Samsung and Google have partnered to bring Google Photos to TysonOS-powered TVs, launching in March

26 and showing curated memories ahead of CES 2026, which reminds me, ah! CES starts in a week, quoting Android police. Google Photos is accessible on all major platforms except for the biggest screen in your home, the TV. For reasons best known to Google, it doesn't offer a native Google Photos app for Google TV, and that can make your viewing of your photos and videos on the big screen far more cumbersome than it should be. Samsung will finally address this gap by integrating Google Photos directly into its TIS-powered TVs. Ahead of CES 2026, the company announced a partnership with Google to integrate Google Photos into its TVs, based on Samsung's press release, though, it appears you will not be able to

to browse through your entire photos library. Instead, Samsung TVs will show curated memories organized by people, places, and moments. The memories will launch in March 26 and remain exclusive to Samsung TVs for the first six months. Later in the year, Nanobanana will arrive on Google Photos for Samsung TVs via the Create with AI feature. It will let you generate themed templates with the remix tool, helping you to transform the style of your photos or videos directly on the big screen. Samsung notes that select AI templates will be exclusive to its TVs. Samsung and Google also plan to bring personalized results to Google Photos on Samsung TVs. It will enable you to view related photos as a slideshow based on topics or contents of memories, e.g. Ocean,

hiking, Paris, etc. The feature will arrive in the second half of 2026. Google Photos integration will debut on Samsung TVs that launch in 2026. It will roll out to select existing TVs through a software update later in the year. Given Google Photos' popularity, its integration into Samsung TVs makes a lot of sense. It brings one of Google's most used services to the biggest screen in the house. And this will help deliver a better experience as you'll no longer have to fumble around with casting photos and videos through Google Photos to the TV, end quote. ACCA, the world's largest accounting body says it is ending remote exams in order to combat a rise in students cheating on those exams by using AI tools when taking the tests.

Quoting the FT, the Association of Chartered Certified Account. which has 257,900 members will end its online exams beginning in March requiring candidates to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstances, its chief executive Helen Brand told the Financial Times. Remote testing had been introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow students to continue qualifying into the profession during lockdowns. But the ACCA has concluded that online tests have become too difficult to police, particularly as artificial intelligence has made cheating more.

difficult to combat. We're seeing the sophistication of cheating systems outpacing what can be put in in terms of safeguards, said brand. The accounting profession has been hit by a series of cheating scandals of late involving thousands of staff with firms such as PWC, KPMG, and Deloitte fined millions of dollars in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. EY agreed to pay a record $100 million fine to U.S. regulators in 2022 over claims that dozens of its employees cheated on an ethics exam and that the firm then misled investigators, end quote. Finally today, you might have seen that video over the holidays that went viral of a man testing out a humanoid robot only for it to kick him in the nards. Don't know if that was AI slop or not, but regardless, I saw this piece in the journal

looking at how executives at humanoid robot startups like agility robotics and weave robotics are managing safety risks and tempering expectations for robotics as a technology. Quote, according to a survey of executives, the cost of installing robots is the biggest reason companies avoid deploying robots, said Annie Kelkar, a partner at McKinsey. For every $100 spent on deploying robots today, only around 20 is the actual machine, with the rest being spent on equipment and systems designed to protect humans from injury, Calcar said. In theory, a humanoid robot won't need the same safeguards as an industrial arm that might weigh thousands of pounds and operate at high speeds. Tesla's Optimus robot stands approximately 5 feet 8 inches.

tall and weighs 125 pounds. Unitreys G1 is even smaller at four feet and 77 pounds. But the gulf between the promise of the technology and what it can do today is wide, Calcar says. We're doing a big extrapolation from watching videos of robots doing laundry to a butler in my house that can do everything, he said. Company leaders say there is a narrow set of roles where human-like robots make sense today, including performing simple repetitive tasks such as moving boxes. Persona is building a welding robot for a shipbuilding company, a function, Radford said, is ripe for robotitization because the danger involved makes labor hard to find. For something like robot butlers, the market is further off, he said. Beyond the macroeconomic trends, improvements in battery and

motor technology mean that robots are becoming more adept at mimicking human motion and can work for longer periods. Earlier this month, the CEO of one of the hottest robot startups out there, figure AI posted a video of the company's latest humanoid bot jogging in a manner eerily similar to a human. Dozens of robot startups are attracting huge investments with around $5 billion being invested in humanoid robots this year, said Calcar of McKinsey, end quote. Speaking of CES, by the way, I've been going around telling everyone that this will be the year of robotics at CES, the first real domestic robots, even if they'll still be early and expensive.

So let's see if that actually pans out. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.