Nvidia’s Groq deal is the latest deal to shake up Silicon Valley

AI coding company Windsurf was on the verge of being acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion, but the deal fell through at the last minute.

Google has emerged as a new suitor. In exchange for a full acquisition, Google announced it would pay $2.4 billion to hire a CEO, top talent, and license the company’s intellectual property.

Windsurf effectively split in two, with its remaining few hundred employees joining Cognition, another AI coding startup.

“This breaks the social contract of Silicon Valley,” Amjad Massad, CEO of windsurfing competitor Replit, said at the time. “This is bad for startup employees. They will be less likely to join a startup. What’s the point of joining a startup and working hard if you might fail?”

In June, Meta spent $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI and poached CEO Alexander Wang.

A recent Business Insider investigation found that the legion of human data labelers who made Scale AI a powerhouse are increasingly quitting the company entirely, angry about pay cuts, long unpaid training sessions to take on new AI projects, and reduced workloads.

Scale AI spokesman Joe Osborne said the balance sheet shows the company is on the right path.

“We expect this quarter to be our strongest quarter of 2025. Our data business is more profitable now than it was before the Meta transaction,” Osborn told Business Insider.

Last year, Google agreed to pay $2.5 billion to license Character AI’s technology and hire its two superstar co-founders and 20% of its employees.

“It’s kind of shocking to see an acquisition of a company that has raised so much money so quickly,” Bonfire Ventures managing partner Brett Quinner said at the time.

Last year, Microsoft hired Inflection AI’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and nearly its entire workforce. It agreed to pay the startup about $650 million as part of the license fee.

The startup had raised more than $1 billion from backers including Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Nvidia.

The FTC has launched a formal investigation into its dealings with Microsoft.

Founded in 2022 by top researchers from OpenAI and Google, Adept has raised more than $400 million and was valued at $1 billion, with backing from Microsoft, Nvidia and others.

And last year, Amazon hired some of Adept’s co-founders and employees to help boost the tech giant’s AI capabilities.