Ai has unleashed funny times
Regulators have no clue how to regulate
Ai is pure talent, capital may be secondary
The mighty big tech Amazon is a joke in India. They never learnt from “live in Rome like the Romans do”. They tried to do business in India like they do in America. They got away with murder initially. And their karma caught up with them when they tried to get into a fist fight with Reliance.
Amazon hired India’s most expensive law firm and paid them what is rumoured to be the highest legal fees ever paid to a law firm. The ask “make a mockery of Indian laws. It wasn’t much of an ask given that anyway the legal system doesn’t work”. But what followed will make India and Indians proud.
First step was to get into a business which was banned for foreign cos. Multi brand retail. They claimed they were not doing any retail at all (oh really !!!). But were doing IT services. Then they got one of the IT industries most eminent individuals to throw his morals into the gutter and set up a front company (money can buy anything !!!!!) to sell on this so called IT platform. The front company was doing the sale and not Amazon.
Second step was to try and take over the largest retail player – the Kishore Biyani group. To do that they first got into the company as an investor and worked to kill it. Like Ratan Tata said “nothing destroys iron like its own rust”. When the group got stressed by debt and covid, Amazon tried to prevent sale of the business trying to misuse the legal system.
Third step – they got the consumer court act modified to say that a consumer could sue an online sellor in his hometown. So to destroy any emerging competitor, all they had to do was to place orders from obtuse places and then file cases on the startup. The startup would die under the weight of expensive litigation. To save themselves they started suing customers in Hyderabad so that consumer proceedings would fail (you can’t go to consumer court if the supplier has already sued you). So u buy an iPhone, get a brick instead and can do nothing about it.
But then entered Ambani. They just hired all the staff of big bazaar and took over leases of all the stores. There was no acquisition. And the courts and Amazon could do nothing. No competition commission approval was required or sought. And the largest retail acquisition was completed. But then no acquisition happened.
Nvidia learnt this playbook. Silicon Valley just discovered the Ambani model as the new way to eliminate competition. And it is completely legal. Made in India. Piloted by Ambani.
Nvidia did not buy Groq at all.
They hired the CEO.
Licensed the IP for $20V
Hollowed the company.
Never triggered a single regulatory review.
Yet the sellors all got paid
Booking the license fee as an expense, $8B of tax was saved.
Their strongest H100 competitor disappeared without an antitrust hearing.
Samsungs ambition to make GPUs thru Groq were scuttled.
Americans are coming to India to learn LAW.
