Nvidia bought Groq's tech for $20B, does inference hardware competition even matter if Nvidia just buys the winners?

Feels weird that there's more AI chip startups than ever right now (Cerebras went public, a few others are shipping actual hardware) but then Nvidia just bought Groq's whole tech and team for ~$20B instead of competing with them (source). kind of makes it feel like "competition" just means getting acquired eventually. Anyone actually using non-Nvidia hardware day to day, or does CUDA lock-in make switching not worth it in practice?