My Guess Is That IBM Will Acquire Groq within the Next 24 Months

If this IBM (IBM) / Groq (Private) go-to-market partnership gains any traction, IBM will move to acquire Groq within the next 24 months.

• Groq’s inference chips (“LPUs”, “Learning Processing Units”), can help breath life into IBM’s AI effort and broader cloud ecosystem.

• Groq’s LPUs pair well with IBM’s opensource LLM effort and would help keep model costs low as inference-related processes would be optimized. This also means that IBM cloud services running on top of IBM’s opensource LLMs could be priced lower than competitive cloud services running on proprietary LLMs. The unknown is how many opensource LLM users will want to run their models in the cloud? Individuals are more likely to download opensource LLMs whereas Enterprise users are more likely to operate opensource models in the cloud for compliance reasons.

• IBM’s Enterprise reach is a sales channel Groq could not hope to replicate organically in short order, regardless of capital on-hand.

Here is the recent press release: HERE

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