Meta’s latest acquisition highlights a widening gap between ambition and execution. Despite heavy investment, the company has yet to define how AI will reshape its advertising-driven model or deliver meaningful returns.
On December 29th, 2025, Meta acquired Manus AI: a general artificial intelligence agent that can perform multi-step tasks ranging from research to analysis. Users find that Manus AI can create complete projects from start to finish without requiring intermittent prompts. The Singapore-based startup launched in March 2025 and achieved over $100 million in annualized average revenue in the eight months prior to the acquisition. While the exact transaction amount is not public, Manus AI was in a VC funding round at 2 billion dollars, so Meta must have paid at least that amount.
This acquisition is one of Meta’s many initiatives to stack up against its peers in the AI space, all of which reveal a problem: the company is spending aggressively on artificial intelligence without a clearly defined strategy for how these technologies will generate revenue.
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