SINGAPORE: Chinese gaming and internet company Tencent is in talks to become Manus’ largest shareholder as investors seek alternatives after Beijing ordered Meta to unwind its US$2 billion (RM8.1 billion) acquisition of the AI startup, two people with knowledge of the matter said yesterday.
The Financial Times first reported Tencent’s talks earlier in the day.
Tencent, together with Manus’ original investors including ZhenFund and HSG, is planning to buy the company back from Meta for no less than US$2 billion, said one of the sources and a third person briefed on the matter.
Tencent, Manus, Meta and the two investment firms did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Manus, which develops AI agents that can autonomously carry out tasks with minimal human input, moved its operations to Singapore last year from China.
Meta announced in December the acquisition of Manus in a bid to bolster its own work on agentic AI. However, China launched a review in April into whether the deal violated investment rules.
The Manus order in April was the latest high-profile case of China blocking or challenging a cross-border transaction involving a non-China-incorporated company, amid increasing geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington.
Since Beijing’s order, Meta has executed an operational split from Manus internally and stopped data sharing between the firms, Bloomberg News reported last month.
Manus was hailed early last year by state media and commentators as China’s next DeepSeek after releasing what it said was the world’s first general AI agent.
