The most expensive commodity in Silicon Valley these days is neither buildings nor patents—it is people. More precisely, it is the tiny group of core talent that drives the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem. Companies are no longer swallowing entire firms whole; instead, they are buying the founders, developers, and the teams they have built. This is the "acq-hire," a combination of acquisition and hire.
Acq-hire has become the grammar of the talent war in the AI era. Big Tech has poured $40 billion into acq-hires over the past two years to absorb the core AI development teams of promising startups. Microsoft paid $650 million to Inflection AI in 2024 to bring on its co-founders and key employees, securing AI model licenses in the process. Google bet $400 million on DeepMind in 2014, and DeepMind's researchers went on to create AlphaGo and Gemini. Meta, formerly Facebook, once swallowed the social feed startup FriendFeed for $47.5 million. The service later disappeared, but the team melted into the heart of Meta's news feed algorithm.
Korea, too, has entered the range of acq-hire. The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) decided to overhaul its system within this year to include acq-hires among new types of business combinations subject to review. It is a preemptive response to the growing likelihood that AI startups dreaming of becoming "K-Nvidia" or promising bio-ventures will become primary targets. Acq-hire is one of the strategies tech companies use to survive periods of technological upheaval. But if technology hunts that border on "talent poaching" run rampant, the very dream of startups could be corrupted. The moment the goal becomes building "a company that sells at a good price" rather than "technology that changes the world," entrepreneurial spirit quietly dies. The side effects—existing investors, minority shareholders, and ordinary employees being sidelined—are not trivial either.
Acq-hire clearly has its light and shadow. Creating a fair competitive environment and nurturing the players who will compete in it may be two sides of the same coin. But there is a more fundamental question. How much of the technology and talent that Big Tech is desperate to buy—even with hundreds of millions of dollars in hand—is actually growing on this soil?
