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12th August 2026 – (Beijing) Meta Platforms’ acquisition of artificial-intelligence start-up Manus has formally collapsed, with the company saying it will return to independent operations after Chinese regulators forced an unwind of the deal.
Manus said on Tuesday that, as part of the separation from Meta and to meet rules in some jurisdictions, it will delete certain user data created after Meta completed the purchase. Data generated from 29th December 2025 is due to be wiped between 8.00am and the following window on 23rd–24th August, Singapore time. Affected users may back up material beforehand and restore it from 25th August, with notices via the Manus app and email.
Meta bought Manus on 29th December last year to bolster its AI-agent push. Beijing later examined whether the transaction breached investment rules and in April ordered Meta to reverse the acquisition. Manus and Meta have since been peeling apart; earlier reports said Meta had already ring-fenced the unit internally and stopped data sharing. Manus stressed that the deletions are a separation step, not a response to a breach or cyber incident.
Ownership may shift again once Meta exits. Reuters reported in July, citing people familiar with the matter, that Tencent Holdings (00700) was in talks to become Manus’s largest shareholder, working with existing backers including ZhenFund and HSG on a plan to buy the company back from Meta for no less than US$2 billion.
Manus was founded in China before relocating its main operations to Singapore last year. Its products focus on AI agents that can research and organise information with limited human prompting — a category Big Tech has raced to own. For Hong Kong and China-tech investors the unwind matters less as a US earnings footnote than as a live case of Beijing’s outbound/inbound tech-investment scrutiny colliding with Silicon Valley M&A, and of Tencent potentially reclaiming a strategic AI asset on the secondary market.
How cleanly the data migration finishes in late August, and whether Tencent’s reported buyback closes near the US$2 billion floor, will set the next valuation marker for Chinese-origin AI agents listed or traded through Hong Kong portfolios.