8 deals that defined the year in AI, ranked by dollar valueNEWS | 30 December 2025lighning bolt icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.
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While most of the industry was out of office over the holidays, Nvidia and SoftBank's deal teams were grinding.
Both companies chose the year's quietest stretch to drop news that was anything but: SoftBank said Monday it will acquire digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge for about $4 billion.
Nvidia's move was stranger still. On Christmas Eve, it announced a "non-exclusive licensing agreement" with Groq, the startup behind custom chips designed to handle AI inference — the real-time work that powers chatbot replies. The companies did not disclose financial terms.
While Nvidia didn't call it an acquisition, the guts of the arrangement looked familiar. Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross, along with top engineering staff, will head to Nvidia. Groq, last valued at $6.9 billion in a funding round three months ago, will continue to operate independently.
It's the latest example of a new kind of tech dealmaking, where the founder and key engineers get bought out, the technology gets siphoned off, and the startup itself is left in limbo.
That's the vibe of 2025: big, hairy deals that refuse to stay inside the lines.
The industry's biggest moves weren't just splashy acquisitions or eye-watering funding rounds. (We saw those deals, too.) They were sprawling, hard-to-categorize transactions. Money came tied to compute. Licensing came paired with talent raids. Infrastructure deals locked governments and corporate America into yearslong dependencies. These weren't neat mergers or simple checks. They were power grabs that shifted the balance of Silicon Valley and beyond.
These were the eight deals that defined the year in AI, ranked from smallest to largest by dollar value.Author: Ben Bergman. Melia Russell. Source
