> There's also no official source for the amount Nvidia paid for the tech,
Did you honestly believe that this kind of deal doesn't leave a trace in financial disclosures?
The February 2026 Nvidia 10-K has this:
Cash flows from investing activities: Groq. -$13B.
And this: "Total consideration consists of $13.0 billion paid at closing and $4 billion, inclusive of imputed interest, payable within one year included in Accrued and Other Current Liabilities on our Consolidated Balance
Sheets."
> you use a different format and suffer quality loss by transcending.
Compressing to AV1/h264/265 etc is really only done for the final version, but that doesn't mean that videos are stored in RAW format during editing, where it is very common to store frames locally in Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or some other compressed format that's targeted towards professional editing.
Contrary to AV1 or whatever similar format which offer compression ratios of 1000x and more, these formats have a compression ratio of around 10x. They are very simple, and the quality loss is low enough that it doesn't matter. They also tend to store images with 30 bits per pixel instead of the 24 bpp that's normally used for streaming.
You’re not wrong but I do think it’s worth clarifying that any professional production with a budget, even a modest one, is generally being shot with a raw codec -> edited/colored with proxies -> rendered with the original raw codec where they compress for the final cut.
ProRes and the like are used for proxies or quick and dirty productions that are mostly shooting their look in camera because of a fast turnaround time. This is usually event work on a budget or something for social media.
Besides the legal requirement, the reason these companies go public is often to provide liquidity for early investors or employees. So they do want to have as good of a margin story that they can, at least in terms of unit margin.
This is an interesting anomaly in the US. In the civilised world all corporations have to file public accounts, as the price for their limited liability. The detail and audit requirements depend on the size, turnover, staff numbers etc. This is because the shareholders are not the only stakeholder. The companies creditors, for instance, who are exposed to the limited liability have a right to see what they are lending to.
To answer the sibling comment, all of these public accounts follow local GAAP or IFRS.
The US still astounds me with its willingness to allow corporations to rip people off!
Creditors in the US can make visibility into financials a requirement for financing if they want. Protecting creditors isn’t a good argument for public reporting.
What about potential employees, can they look? The local community that consents to let the company build and operate in their town? How does that help, if they don't follow have to follow GAAP anyway?
Why are those things relevant to either employees or a town?
Most of the US is at-will so the financial health of the company is unlikely to be the reason you’ll suddenly lose a job.
Same for a town, if you’re structuring a deal that has counterparty risk then you mitigate the risk. If an employer is just leasing some office space in your town, why in the world would you ever even think you had the need to look at their financials?
As a consumer you are often sending deposits or even the full cost of goods to companies some time before you receive those goods (in effect you become a creditor). You are also dependent upon some of those companies for service and repairs. It seems reasonable that you can check the finances of a company you are creating a business relationship with, I know in the past I've checked company statements.
You are unlikely to have significant enough sway to force that kind of disclosure. Small businesses as consumers have less legal protection and are similarly unlikely to be able to make disclosure a precondition of a deal.
So what. As a customer you can insist on seeing audited financial statements as a condition of purchasing, or purchase from another vendor, or do without. No problem.
In the early nineties, it was common for experienced electrical engineers to keep on using schematic entry digital design and look down on RTL and synthesis tools, despite that fact the latter was already way more productive. At some point, management had to put their foot down and force everyone to switch to using synthesis.
It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unwilling to change their behavior without a bit of a push.
It is completely unreasonable to assume that. Tech people are so hungry for productivity gains that they regularly will defy management forbidding them from using a tool, because the tool is so good they feel they have to have it.
If LLMs truly are as good as their proponents say, engineers will use them even if management outright forbade it. The fact that people aren't using them, and have to be forced, is extremely strong evidence that they are not in fact that useful.
> extremely strong evidence that they are not in fact that useful.
Surely you can't argue in good faith today that LLMs aren't useful? It was a valid argument a year ago, but the latest models are absolutely useful at solving whole classes of problems.
They're not perfect, need to be carefully monitored, can cause weird gambling like dopamine rushes and can cause lazy development habits to creep in. But none of those things negate the fact that, in many situations, they are useful.
There was no synthesis algorithms that would map VHDL or Verilog designs into domino logic elements at the time. I believe that the most work in the synthesis-to-domino-logic area was done at the beginning of current century.
So, DEC's engineers and, I think, Intel's engineers were doing work using schematics well into 21-st century.
I guess the only difference between this and your example is the concrete efficiency gain from RTL and synthesis tools versus dubious applications of AI. I do agree with the second point about pushing people to explore new ways of doing things though.
Leaving aside the ethical aspects of using AI (not because they're not valid, because they're off topic for this discussion), in my line of work, the capabilities and productivity improvement of AI are staggering. Most of it is not writing the new code, which is but a small part of chip design, but everything else.
I can't give a concrete work example, but here is an experiment that I ran a month ago. https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge.... If it can do that, it's not hard to imaging similar use cases related to root causing complex simulation failures. It is frighteningly good at that.
> use cases related to root causing complex simulation failures.
That's a pretty interesting use case. I assume this is for RTL simulation given the thread, but how do you connect the output of the simulator to the AI?
For a small case, a colleague took a screenshot of waves in the waveform viewer and pasted it into the AI tool. It worked.
But for large cases, use tools to extract all interfaces from the waveform file and save it as a text file, or add $display statements in the Verilog itself to dump the transactions. A SOTA LLM will eat it up. You point it to the RTL, a log file with hundreds of thousands of lines, and give it a few lines to explain how it is supposed to behave. Just tell it "My simulation is hanging. Figure why." Wait 15 minutes and it will tell you why it hangs and which line to change in your code to fix it.
I've done the experiment after the fact: I had spent ~3 days to fix complicated 3 bugs. I then rolled back the code and told it "Here is the spec. Find all the bugs in this code". It found all 3 bugs in around 30 min. That's when I realized that things won't be the same anymore. (And don't get me wrong: I love debugging simulations.)
>And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?
A bottom-up approach has a far better chance of finding those particularly good use cases, and if you lean on the people how found those fits, they're more persuasive than top-down edicts. They actually know what they're talking about. If the point is to leverage AI for better work outcomes, someone with your experience is far more valuable than "here's a dashboard, make the number go up," which seems to be what's going on at Amazon.
I'd bet my life savings that the person who is forced to use a tool by top-down edict is less likely to find a valuable use case than the person who is sincerely curious about said tool.
Have you tried to change your HDL to something more modern like Bluespec System Verilog or, god forbid, anything embedded into Haskell or Scala?
I read that BSV source code is about three times shorter than similar design in Verilog and also has three times smaller defect density (defects per significant line of code). So just by changing the HDL from Verilog to BSV one can have nine (9) times less defects in the design.
BSV won't help for cases you didn't think about a corner case. (I use SpinalHDL/Scala for all my hobby projects, BTW, and yes, I tend to make less mistakes.)
If I could choose only 1 criterium to select a laptop, it's the quality of the trackpad. So far, I haven't tried anything that comes close to a Macbook.
*criterion. criterium is not even a typo, it’s an actual word but it doesn’t mean what you think it means, unless you’re planning to use your laptop while bicycling.
Did you honestly believe that this kind of deal doesn't leave a trace in financial disclosures?
The February 2026 Nvidia 10-K has this:
Cash flows from investing activities: Groq. -$13B.
And this: "Total consideration consists of $13.0 billion paid at closing and $4 billion, inclusive of imputed interest, payable within one year included in Accrued and Other Current Liabilities on our Consolidated Balance Sheets."
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