(By You Yunting) According to press reports, the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Nvidia’s roughly $20 billion transaction with AI inference chip company Groq. The question is whether the deal’s structure — a technology licence coupled with the hiring of key personnel — was deliberately designed to circumvent antitrust review. Deals of this kind are now common in AI. Off the top of my head: Microsoft and Inflection AI, Google and Character.AI, Google and Windsurf, Meta and Scale AI. Why do some attract scrutiny while others do not? That is what I want to discuss today.