No engineer left behind. On Friday night, Google said it would hire the top talent of a developer of artificial intelligence tools called Windsurf, including its chief executive. As part of the $2.4bn package, it will also license Windsurf’s technology. Welcome to Silicon Valley, where the line between acquiring people and acquiring businesses gets ever fuzzier.
While tech giants are getting a warmer reception from US President Donald Trump’s administration than they did under Joe Biden, making acquisitions is still far from easy. While big deals still happen — Google’s $32bn purchase of cloud security company Wiz, for example — buying whole companies comes with high prices and the risk of antitrust hassle.
That bolsters the appeal of the so-called acqui-hire: striking a deal with a company to get at its people. Another example is Facebook owner Meta Platforms’ $14bn tie-up with Scale AI, a business that labels data for use in large language models. For its money it gets founder Alexandr Wang, who also becomes Meta’s chief AI officer, as well as half the company.