Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son shakes hands with US President Donald Trump. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Nvidia and SoftBank closed major tech deals over the holidays. The year saw unconventional tech deals, including Disney's bet on OpenAI and the Stargate Project. Nvidia recently signed a licensing agreement with Groq, acquiring talent rather than the company. 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. Nvidia's Groq invasion Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Johannes Neudecker/picture alliance via Getty Images Nvidia ended the year doing the same thing that turned heads all year: extracting founders from their startups and leaving other employees to figure it out. On Christmas Eve, Nvidia announced it had entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq. The financial terms were undisclosed. Under the agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq's founder and CEO, as well as the startup's president and other team members, will join Nvidia, the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of over $4.5 trillion. Groq will continue to operate as an independent company, with CFO Simon Edwards assuming the CEO role. Disney's $1 billion gamble OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made his late-night debut on NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon." : Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images Disney struck a three-year licensing agreement with OpenAI in December, becoming the first major content partner for Sora, OpenAI's video generator. The deal isn't just about rights. Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and receive warrants to buy additional equity — a structure that ties content, distribution, and upside together. Business Insider reporter Lucia Moses argues the logic can be summed up in one word: engagement. Time spent on Disney+ and other major streaming services has remained essentially flat in recent years, she writes, while YouTube and social video continue to grow. The OpenAI partnership could help Disney meet audiences where they already are, by allowing fans to use tools like ChatGPT and Sora to generate and remix content featuring Disney characters. Windsurf's $2.4 billion cautionary tale Google CEO Sundar Pichai Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/Reuters Developer coding assistant Windsurf was a startup Cinderella story. Then it became a cautionary tale. The company was in talks to sell to OpenAI for $3 billion this past spring. The deal fell apart at the last minute. Google emerged as a new suitor. Instead of an outright acquisition, Google said it would pay $2.4 billion to hire its CEO and top talent, as well as license the company's intellectual property. The deal effectively split Windsurf into two pieces, with the hundreds of remaining employees ending up at Cognition, another AI coding startup. That left some with a bitter taste. Part of the social contract in startups is that early employees work long hours at lower pay in the hope that they will share in the riches should their startup eventually get acquired or go public. Now, traditional acquisitions have become rarer because of the time and uncertainty of getting regulatory approval. As a result, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta have been getting creative, using licensing deals to skirt regulators and snap up key talent. SoftBank's $4 billion infrastructure play Masayoshi Son. YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images SoftBank snapped up a private equity firm with the ultimate goal of controlling more of the physical infrastructure behind AI. On Monday, SoftBank said it has entered into an agreement to acquire DigitalBridge, an alternative asset manager that invests in data centers, cell towers, fiber networks, and power that make the AI boom possible. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. The deal comes as SoftBank reshuffles its portfolio. In November, the company said it had sold nearly $6 billion of Nvidia stock to free up cash for OpenAI. SoftBank is also doubling down on "physical AI," building a robotics beachhead with a dedicated investment arm and a pending deal to buy ABB's robotics business. Trump's $8.9 billion Intel stake The US will require H-1B applicants to make their social media public for visa vetting, a State Department spokesperson said. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images The Trump administration agreed to take a 9.9% stake in Intel in August. It was a rare moment when Washington wasn't just regulating an industry or subsidizing it, but buying into it. Under the terms Intel disclosed, the government will invest $8.9 billion for 433.3 million shares, and the stake is to be passive, with no board seat. The investment aims to bolster domestic capacity for designing and manufacturing advanced chips. Intel has seen foreign competitors, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, cut into its market share of advanced chips. The White House has said it is a national security risk if industries continue to import the vast majority of advanced chips from overseas. This also likely won't be the last deal of its kind. President Donald Trump and top aides have floated the idea of doing similar deals with American defense contractors and have considered a sovereign wealth fund. Meta's $14 billion hire Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, and Zodi Chalat attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 11, 2024 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images One of the year's biggest deals sparked the question: Was Meta really spending $14 billion to hire a 28-year-old? Alexandr Wang cofounded and ran Scale AI, the data-labeling company that helps enterprises train and deploy AI models by supplying high-quality training data and tooling. In June, Meta agreed to pay $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI — and, just as importantly, to bring Wang in to lead its next act in AI. Wang became Meta's chief AI officer and the public face of its superintelligence push, with a mandate that goes well beyond building better chatbots. His job is to convince elite researchers that Meta is the place to do their life's work — and to turn the company's key advantage, its compute budget, into a lasting edge. Google's $32 billion mega-buy Assaf Rappaport Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch When Google agreed to buy Israeli-American cloud security firm Wiz earlier this year, it threw a $32 billion bucket of water on the idea that the mega-deal drought would persist. In March, Google agreed to acquire the startup at an all-cash price roughly equal to Iceland's gross domestic product last year, pending regulatory sign-off. This marks the search giant's largest acquisition. The acquisition served as an early litmus test of the Trump administration's willingness to greenlight pricey Big Tech mergers and acquisitions. The deal passed an antitrust review by the Department of Justice in November, clearing a key hurdle to closing. Stargate's $500 billion infrastructure push Stargate data center campus in Abilene, Texas. Crusoe Trump kicked off his second term by unveiling a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to build a chain of data centers across the US — a project called Stargate that aims to invest $500 billion in domestic infrastructure by 2029. In Abilene, Texas, a flagship data center has already opened. Construction crews have broken ground on Stargate sites in Lordstown, Ohio, and Port Washington, Wisconsin, with several more campuses to come. To make the ongoing buildout a success, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has estimated it could take one-fifth of the nation's existing skilled trade workforce. Read the original article on Business Insider