By Fanny Potkin and Kane Wu <\/p>\n
SINGAPORE, July 10 (Reuters) – Chinese gaming and internet company Tencent is in talks to become \u200cManus’ largest shareholder as investors seek alternatives after Beijing \u200cordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of the AI startup, two people with \u200bknowledge of the matter said on Friday. <\/p>\n
The Financial Times first reported Tencent’s talks earlier in the day. <\/p>\n
Tencent, together with Manus’ original investors, including ZhenFund and HSG, is planning to buy the company back from Meta \u200cfor no less than $2 \u2060billion, said one of the sources and a third person briefed on the matter. <\/p>\n
Tencent, Manus, Meta and the \u2060two investment firms did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. <\/p>\n
Manus, which develops AI agents that can autonomously carry out tasks with \u200bminimal human \u200binput, moved its operations to Singapore \u200blast year from China. <\/p>\n
Meta announced \u200cin 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. <\/p>\n
The Manus order in April was the latest high-profile case of China blocking or challenging \u200ca cross-border transaction involving a non-China-incorporated \u200bcompany, amid increasing geopolitical tensions between Beijing \u200band Washington. <\/p>\n
Since Beijing’s order, \u200bMeta has executed an operational split from Manus internally \u200cand stopped data sharing between the \u200bfirms, Bloomberg News \u200breported last month. <\/p>\n
Manus was hailed early last year by state media and commentators as China’s next DeepSeek after releasing what \u200bit said was the \u200cworld’s first general AI agent. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Fanny Potkin and Kane \u200bWu in Singapore and Preetika Parashuraman in Bengaluru; Editing \u200bby Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Muralikumar Anantharaman) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Fanny Potkin and Kane Wu SINGAPORE, July 10 (Reuters) – Chinese gaming and internet company Tencent is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":578312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,19,229691,17,133708,82,1475],"class_list":["post-578311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-investment-firms","tag-ireland","tag-manus","tag-technology","tag-tencent"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116894663272110506","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}