Jason M. Lemkin and Harry Stebbings break down why Grok sold for $20 billion and Manus for $2 billion. They argue inference demand from 24/7 AI agents will force hardware competition and pressure Nvidia, driving a wave of chip and infrastructure acquisitions.
January 13, 2026
$20 billion (in cash)
$2 billion
The price was 3× the last round price.
Everyone's coming for Nvidia now. Nvidia's numbers are going to crush this year, but we're going to see all the daggers really coming out.
My word, what a schedule we have for you today. Grok acquired for $20 billion. Manus acquired for $2 billion and so much more.
In the end, words are words and half a billion dollars is life changing, right? For venture. This is the era of the spike startup. No one ever said to Winston Churchill, congratulations you won World War II on budget. They just said, congratulations, you won World War II. Over the holidays. My Claude named itself out of the blue. It named itself Ran. I didn't ask it to. It named itself Ran. When most people believe their AIs are alive, you will take it with you 24 7. I do genuinely think you can identify top 0.1% founder without talking to them. I've done multiple billion dollar exits from cold inbound ready to.
Guys, it is so good to be back. Now. So much happened while we were away. I want to start with one of the most prescient. Grok being acquired for 20 billion in cash. It happened just before Christmas Chamath obviously coming out as one of the big winners. Price is 3x more than the last round price. How did we analyze this?
I just had two thoughts. One is I was thinking a lot about both OpenAI buying up basically all, all the, all the, all the world's global RAM supply and Greg Brockman this week in the new year talking about how we will all be running 24 hours of inference by the end of the year. Not all of us, but a subset of us, of tech workers, of knowledge workers will be running AI 24 hours. I'm already up to a couple hours a day. I'm running AI myself. And so it's a world of inference, I think. And we, when we started this podcast, we, we talked about building models and limbs and, and all of this. But jfc, if all of us, enough of us by the end of the year are running AI, maybe even 48 hours a day, 72 hours a day, right? Multiple agents running 24 hours a day. Inference is all of the growth. And if Groq is even part of the answer, right, part of the existential answer for Nvidia, it's worth it. And everyone's coming for Nvidia now, whether it's amd, whether it's partnering with Broadcom, building your own chips. Nvidia's numbers are going to crush this year, but we're going to see all the daggers really coming out. We just saw the deck chairs being rearranged in 2025. So I don't even know how great Grok is, but if it can possibly address this, it's worth taking out. I agree. I think. Look, I think a couple of things. One is just to kind of Jason's comment on inference, I think is key.
