Breaking news! Global giant Meta spends billions of dollars to acquire a rising Chinese AI company. Just how high is the ceiling for AI?

In late 2025, the tech world was abuzz with news: Meta acquired Butterfly Effect, the company that develops the AI ​​app Manus, for billions of dollars. This was Meta's third-largest acquisition since its inception, second only to WhatsApp and Scale AI.

This acquisition marks Meta's deep involvement in the AI ​​Agent field, aiming to accelerate the automation and commercialization of its AI ecosystem by integrating Manus's consumer-grade product capabilities.

Manus, founded by serial entrepreneur Xiao Hong, has a core product that is a general-purpose AI agent capable of autonomously performing complex tasks, including market research, coding, and itinerary planning.

Since its launch in March 2025, Manus has rapidly risen to prominence thanks to its efficient task processing capabilities and user-friendly interface. Its annualized recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed $100 million in mid-December and has been expanding at a monthly growth rate of 20%.

Prior to the acquisition, Manus was pursuing a new round of financing at a valuation of $2 billion, but Meta quickly completed negotiations with a higher offer, the entire process taking only a little over ten days.

“Superintelligence will usher in a new era of personal empowerment: it will give people greater agency, allowing us to drive the world forward as we see fit,” Zuckerberg wrote in an open letter this July. He added that they possess the vast resources and expertise of Meta, along with the ability and willingness to deliver new technologies to billions of people through their products, and are “excited to focus Meta’s resources on building this future.”

Meta’s ambitious moves are not an isolated case, but a true reflection of the global AI industry competition. To seize technological dominance, Meta has not only invested heavily in acquisitions but also offered hundreds of millions of dollars in annual salaries to top AI researchers and restructured its core team. This multi-billion dollar acquisition ripple effect is part of Zuckerberg’s vision of “superintelligence.”

From an industry trend perspective, 2025 is widely recognized as the “Year Zero of AI Intelligent Agents.” Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software will embed agent-based AI, and 15% of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by intelligent agents.

Currently, 85% of organizations worldwide have deployed AI agents, and the market size of this sector has more than doubled, from $3.7 billion in 2023 to $7.38 billion in 2025.

Giants like Google, OpenAI, and ByteDance are all following suit, making high-quality small and medium-sized enterprises in the AI ​​Agent sector highly sought after by investors.

Goldman Sachs estimates that AI investment in the US may approach $100 billion in 2025, and globally it may approach $200 billion.

There are already over 35,000 AI-related companies globally, with over 5,100 in China. The global AI market size is projected to exceed $2 trillion in 2025 and reach $15 trillion by 2030. The .ai domain suffix, as a "dedicated identifier" for artificial intelligence, has become the primary signal for users to identify AI companies.

As the AI ​​sector surges, .ai domains, carrying industry identity, are also experiencing a value explosion. Just as the .com domain name appreciated in value with the rise of the internet, the .ai domain name is riding the wave of the AI ​​industry and becoming "gold in the digital age".

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