AIInference

$20 billion. For a company most people have never heard of. When NVIDIA—the undisputed heavyweight of AI hardware—writes a check that size, you can bet it’s not for the office plants. The Groq acquisition (or licensing deal, reports vary) represents something bigger than just another tech giant buying a competitor. It’s a signal that the entire AI industry just pivoted hard. The training era is over. The inference era just arrived with a $20 billion price tag. ...

The AI landscape is experiencing a fundamental shift. After years of focusing on training massive models, the industry is pivoting toward inference — the phase where trained models actually do useful work. This isn’t just a technical change; it’s an economic revolution that will reshape data centers, business models, and how we think about AI infrastructure. What Makes Training and Inference Different? Think of AI development in two distinct phases. Training is like going to medical school — an intense, expensive, one-time investment where you learn everything. Inference is like practicing medicine — you use what you learned millions of times, every single day. ...