Many were surprised by the news when Nvidia announced last week it was acquiring a non-exclusive license and the R&D team of Groq for $20 billion, the AI inference chip company that has been operating for nine years (not to be confused with Grok, Elon Musk’s morally murky AI chatbot). However, a much less noticeable announcement was Meta’s acquisition of another TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) company, Rivos, for an undisclosed amount, though industry insiders suggest a valuation of around $4 billion. Let’s examine the background of these two earth-shattering deals and why they mark only the beginning of a much larger shift. Training vs. inference: where the real battle is Generative AI today is split between training and inference. Training requires massive amounts of compute power and…