Manus

$20 billion. For a company most people have never heard of. When NVIDIA—the undisputed heavyweight of AI hardware—writes a check that size, you can bet it’s not for the office plants. The Groq acquisition (or licensing deal, reports vary) represents something bigger than just another tech giant buying a competitor. It’s a signal that the entire AI industry just pivoted hard. The training era is over. The inference era just arrived with a $20 billion price tag. ...

147 trillion tokens. 80 million virtual computers. A few months of operation. Those numbers don’t just describe a successful startup—they describe infrastructure that’s already running at scale while most AI agent companies are still writing whitepapers. Meta just paid roughly $2 billion for that head start, and if you think this is just another acqui-hire, you’re missing what’s actually happening. What Manus Actually Built Before we get into why Meta cares, let’s talk about what Manus is. Imagine you need to research a complex topic—say, comparing healthcare policies across twelve countries, pulling recent legislative changes, and summarizing how they’d affect a specific demographic. You could spend three days doing that yourself, or you could hand it to an AI agent that breaks down the task, spins up the necessary tools, and delivers a structured report while you grab coffee. ...

When you casually exit a $5.8 billion Nvidia position to fund your next bet, you’re either catastrophically wrong or playing a different game than everyone else. SoftBank chose the latter this week, dumping those chips into a $40 billion stake in OpenAI. That’s not a typo. Forty. Billion. Dollars. For context, that’s roughly what Disney paid for Fox’s entertainment assets, or what Microsoft spent acquiring Activision Blizzard after a year-long regulatory cage match. Except SoftBank just did it for a slice—about 10%—of a company that makes chatbots. Well, chatbots that happen to be reshaping how we work, write, and think about intelligence itself. ...