Five deals in fourteen months moved the line between a merger and a hiring spree. The line kept losing. OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for a hardware startup with 55 employees and a trademark it later dropped1. Google paid $2.4 billion for a license and two executives, leaving the rest of the company to a third buyer23. Nvidia paid $20 billion for a rival's technology and let the rival keep its name and its doors open6. Its CEO came along. Every buyer here spent premium money on a roster rather than a balance sheet. Antitrust lawyers now ask whether that difference still carries legal weight.
Buying a Designer Ahead of a Product
Sam Altman's clearest people-first purchase closed July 9, 20251. OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for io Products, the hardware startup Jony Ive founded with three Apple veterans: Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan. Its Startup Fund had already bought 23% of io for $1.5 billion in late 2024. July mostly converted an existing bet into full ownership. All 55 io employees joined OpenAI. Ive and his firm LoveFrom stayed formally separate. He kept design control over the hardware line the deal was meant to speed up.
Speed proved the hard part. Wired reported in 2026 that OpenAI dropped the io name during a trademark fight1. The launch slid to 2027. Two years and $8 billion bought a design team well ahead of a product. Hardware companies usually raise and spend in the opposite order.
Windsurf Changes Hands Three Times
Two buyers went after one target with opposite structures. That makes 2025 the cleanest case study in how an acquihire differs from a purchase. OpenAI talked first, reportedly for the whole company3. The deal collapsed over Microsoft's contract rights to OpenAI's technology, per Computerworld. Google moved into the gap fast2. It paid $2.4 billion in July 2025 for a license to Windsurf's coding technology, plus direct hires of chief executive Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen. That bought Google the people and the code. It skipped the balance sheet, the customer contracts and the rest of the staff.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, announced it as a hire rather than a purchase. "Thrilled to welcome Windsurf founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and some of the brilliant Windsurf engineering team to Google DeepMind. Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini efforts on coding agents, tool use, and much more."3 Count the nouns in that sentence. Founders, a team, and Gemini efforts. A product and a company appear zero times.
Jeff Wang, Windsurf's head of business and its new interim chief executive, described what stayed behind. "Most of Windsurf's world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise."3 Cognition then claimed that remainder, signing a definitive agreement the same July4. The bet paid on a timeline few acquirers see. Cognition's valuation reached $10 billion by September 2025 and $26 billion by May 2026. Bloomberg reported talks near $40 billion by August. The firm renamed the product Devin Desktop in June 2026, folding Windsurf's interface into its own coding-agent line. Three companies, one target, three theories of what mattered. Google wanted names on an offer letter. Cognition wanted the business those names left.
Meta Pays for One Hire
The company put $14.3 billion into Scale AI for 49% of it, announced June 12 and 13, 20255. That structure was built around a single hire rather than the data-labeling business. Meta said so directly. "Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI. As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts." Read the order of the clauses. Data work comes first, and the name comes last, in the sentence that was the point of the deal.
Wang became Meta's chief AI officer that week5. Jason Droege took the interim CEO seat to run what Wang left. Scale AI's implied value reached $29 billion. Generous pricing, while the real currency changed hands elsewhere. A 49% stake stays under a majority, which keeps the deal below the thresholds that trigger the deepest merger review, and Meta still got the executive it wanted.
Nvidia Absorbs the Rival It Once Fought
December 2025 brought Nvidia's answer to the same question, and its structure pushed the pattern furthest. The company agreed to buy assets from Groq for $20 billion in cash6. A shared license came with it, leaving Groq free to license the same work elsewhere. Several senior Groq leaders agreed to join Nvidia, chief executive Jonathan Ross among them. Both sides said Groq would keep operating on its own, a claim that fits its reported $650 million raise months later.
Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq's technology and leaders, the priciest of 2025's people-first AI deals
Price each buyer paid in its 2025 people-first AI deal, billions of dollars
Each bar is one buyer's deal: the magenta bar is Nvidia's Groq deal, the largest, and the gray bars are the three other buyers' deals.
Sources: Wikipedia [1]; CNBC [2]; TechCrunch [5]; Wikipedia [6]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Nvidia, Groq assets and license | $20B | December 2025, in cash; chief executive Jonathan Ross joined Nvidia |
| Meta, 49% of Scale AI | $14.3B | Announced June 2025; Alexandr Wang became Meta's chief AI officer |
| OpenAI, io Products | $6.5B | Closed July 9, 2025; all 55 io employees joined OpenAI |
| Google, Windsurf license | $2.4B | July 2025; hired Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen with the code |
Analysts read the structure less charitably6. Coverage cited on Nvidia's own Wikipedia entry notes the criticism: the deal looked built to avoid the scrutiny a straight purchase invites. Buying assets and hiring leaders, ahead of buying the company, gave Nvidia what it wanted. Ross and his top lieutenants work at Nvidia. Groq's corporate entity still stands, which is what antitrust reviewers watching chipmaker concentration see.
David Pearl, a partner at the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, raised the harder question in September 2026, after the Justice Department opened its review. "Even if Groq remains technically independent, if the reality is that it exists now only to serve Nvidia, I suspect DOJ would view that as evidence that the transaction was a de facto acquisition," Pearl said9.
When the Premium Fell Short
Every deal above closed. CoreWeave's attempt to buy Core Scientific shows the limit7. CoreWeave agreed in July 2025 to buy the data-center operator for $9 billion. Core Scientific's shareholders voted it down that October. Investors had turned CoreWeave down once before, on a $1 billion offer in 2024. Their resistance sank a deal that skipped the acquihire question, because Core Scientific brought buildings and contracts rather than an executive anyone was chasing. ServiceNow ran the reverse, buying Moveworks for nearly $3 billion in March 2025 and Pyramid Analytics in February 2026, a steadier pace built on product fit8.
A Regulatory Question Still Open
Federal scrutiny predates the biggest of these deals6. The FTC and the Justice Department opened inquiries into Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI in June 2024, well ahead of io, Windsurf, Scale and Groq. Charlie Dai, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, named the incentive out loud. "This will hopefully offer a faster, lower-regulatory-scrutiny path to securing top AI teams. We will likely see more such deals for strategic AI talent, to sidestep merger reviews by regulators and jumpstart critical innovations."3 An analyst said the quiet part first, weeks after the Windsurf deal, and the year that followed proved him right.
Kenneth Schwartz, an antitrust partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, pushed back on that reading in a TechReg Talks interview in February 2026. "There seems to be this knee-jerk reaction to acquihires that they must be nefarious," Schwartz said10. A team paired with a bigger platform's money and compute moves faster than a startup working alone, in his telling, and speed is worth paying for.
Deals built on licensing plus hiring use review thresholds written for an earlier era. Those rules weigh market share and revenue. They were built for factories and customer lists. Today's buyers trade in reputation and research taste, which a merger formula rarely knows how to price.
By the numbers
- OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for io Products, a deal that closed July 9, 20251.
- A $2.4 billion license: what Google paid in July 2025 for Windsurf's code plus Mohan and Chen2.
- Ten billion, then twenty-six billion: Cognition's valuation climb from September 2025 to May 20264.
- Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI in June 2025, and got Alexandr Wang5.
- Twenty billion dollars: Nvidia's December 2025 deal with Groq, which brought Jonathan Ross across6.
- Core Scientific shareholders rejected CoreWeave's $9 billion offer in October 2025, the second refusal in two years7.
- Nearly $3 billion went to Moveworks when ServiceNow bought it in March 20258.
- June 2024: the month the FTC and Justice Department opened AI antitrust inquiries into three of these buyers6.
What to watch
Cognition's reported talks near a $40 billion valuation, if they close, will show whether absorbing an acquihire's leftovers can beat the acquihire itself4. Watch the language regulators use for licensing-plus-hiring6. A formal FTC or DOJ theory aimed at the Groq or Windsurf structure would change how every later AI deal gets papered. Scale AI's performance under Jason Droege gives a live test of a simple question5. Can a company hold its commercial momentum once the buyer's real prize, its founder, has already left?
Sources
- Wikipedia contributors, "io Products," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_Products.
- CNBC Staff, "Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion AI talent deal," CNBC, July 11, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mohan-latest-ai-talent-deal-.html.
- Computerworld Staff, "Google snatches Windsurf execs in a $2.4B deal, derailing OpenAI's biggest acquisition yet," Computerworld, July 14, 2025, https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021763/google-snatches-windsurf-execs-in-a-2-4b-deal-derailing-openais-biggest-acquisition-yet.html.
- Wikipedia contributors, "Cognition AI," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI.
- TechCrunch Staff, "Scale AI confirms 'significant' investment from Meta, says CEO Alexandr Wang is leaving," TechCrunch, June 13, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/scale-ai-confirms-significant-investment-from-meta-says-ceo-alexandr-wang-is-leaving/.
- Wikipedia contributors, "Nvidia," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia.
- Wikipedia contributors, "CoreWeave," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoreWeave.
- Wikipedia contributors, "ServiceNow," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ServiceNow.
- Shane Snider, "DOJ reportedly probes Nvidia-Groq deal for antitrust concerns," TechTarget, Sept. 11, 2026, https://www.techtarget.com/it-infrastructure/news/366650378/DOJ-reportedly-probes-Nvidia-Groq-deal-for-antitrust-concerns.
- PYMNTS, "Skadden Partners Explain the Legal and Strategic Future of Acquihiring in AI," PYMNTS, Feb. 11, 2026, https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/ai-talent-wars-push-acquihiring-into-the-ma-mainstream/.