Meta, SoftBank and Nvidia Splurge on Holiday AI Deals

The dealmakers of the AI sector didn’t take a break this holiday season. Meta revealed this afternoon it had bought Manus, the Singapore-based developer of AI agents. The price wasn’t disclosed but seeing as Manus’ last fundraising valuation was $500 million, Meta might have spent $2 billion or so but not hugely more than that. (More on Manus here and here). SoftBank, meanwhile, today unveiled a $4 billion buyout of DigitalBridge, an investor in data centers, demonstrating that CEO Masayoshi Son’s corporate credit card remains active despite a spate of other purchases lately (including Ampere, ABB’s robotics group, OpenAI, etc). Does Son have a credit limit? 

Then there’s Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who doesn’t need to borrow money to buy stuff, given that he has his own dollar printing plant set up in Nvidia’s basement (that’s a joke! We mean his AI chip business). Unlike SoftBank, Nvidia doesn’t want to shout about every deal it does. Take the $20 billion it has lavished on its far-behind rival, Groq, news of which broke on Christmas Eve. Judging by that timing and the parsimonious public statements from both companies, they were hoping this deal would disappear into the ether amid the holiday carousing. After all, Nvidia probably doesn’t want people asking too many questions about how the biggest-by-far seller of AI chips is allowed to get its hands on the technology and most of the staff of a rival. Ah well, reporters have little else to do but wonder about these things.