Meta acquires general-purpose AI agent company Manus

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> Meta’s 3rd biggest acquisition after WhatsApp & Scale AI

> goal: push automation across Meta’s entire product stack, especially Meta AI

> Manus employees joining Meta; founder-CEO reporting directly to Meta’s COO

> was at ~$125M annualized revenue; claims 147T+ tokens processed & 80M+ virtual computers run

> raised $75M this year at $500M valuation, was fundraising next at $2B val

> Meta to keep Manus’s subscription service running but will exit China: cutting Chinese investors & shutting ops post deal-close

> announced as a non-exclusive NVIDIA licensing deal; effectively an acqui-hire to limit antitrust exposure

> paid ~3x Groq’s prior valuation of ~$6.9B

> NVIDIA’s largest purchase ever; previous record was Mellanox acquisition ($7B, 2019)

> all future Groq tech advancement now to be made inside NVIDIA under former founder-CEO (Google TPU's co-creator)

> effectively hired the TPU creator - chip that enabled Google to reduce reliance on NVIDIA GPUs & drove recent stock divergence

> direct challenge to Google’ inference advantage as NVIDIA strengthens it’s own stack

> Groq (incl. GroqCloud) to continue independently under former CFO

> Gemini at ~15% of ChatGPT scale; usage inside Search & other products excluded

> Nano Banana Pro now overtaken by GPT Image 1.5 across leaderboards

> India ~2x USA in ChatGPT DAUs & ~6x in Gemini; primary volume driver for both firms + Perplexity

> user surge driven by free tiers + ultra-low pricing enabled by partnerships with major internet/telecom players resulted in much lower revenue per user

> India strategy optimized for volume to accumulate high-value multilingual training data