#Meta

Tencent is in negotiations to acquire AI startup Manus from Meta, becoming its largest shareholder in a deal worth at least $2 billion, after Beijing requested Meta to unwind its previous acquisition. This deal would significantly strengthen Tencent's position in the AI agent space, while marking a setback for Meta's expansion in China. It reflects ongoing geopolitical tensions and strategic realignments in the AI industry. Tencent will partner with original investors ZhenFund and HSG to repurchase Manus from Meta at no less than $2 billion. The deal follows a Chinese government request for Meta to unwind its earlier $2 billion acquisition of Manus.

The European Commission has issued preliminary findings that Meta's Facebook and Instagram violate the Digital Services Act due to addictive design features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and personalized recommendations. This marks one of the most significant regulatory actions against addictive design in social media, potentially setting a precedent for how platforms must redesign their interfaces to protect user well-being. If finalized, the fine of up to $12 billion (6% of global revenue) would be among the largest under the DSA. The EU criticizes Meta's current time-limiting tools as ineffective and demands redesigns including disabling these features by default, imposing effective screen breaks, and reducing engagement-driven algorithms. The fine is based on preliminary findings and Meta has the right to respond before a final decision.

Meta publicly launched Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9, 2026, a multimodal AI model designed for agentic coding, with API access available through Meta's developer platform. This release positions Meta as a major competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI coding assistant space, offering aggressive pricing at $1.25 per million input tokens and potentially disrupting the market by commoditizing coding models. The model is evaluated on Terminal-Bench 2.1, but community analysis highlights that resource limits (6 CPU cores, 8GB RAM) were overridden, which may disqualify results. Pricing is $1.25/$4.5 per million tokens for input/output, with $0.15 for cached input.

Meta's superintelligence unit released a one-year progress update highlighting the most aggressive compute ramp ever seen, including a 2000km+ scale-across infrastructure, and the emergence of a top-tier reinforcement learning environment startup. This signals an acceleration in AI infrastructure competition, with Meta's aggressive investment potentially reshaping the superintelligence landscape. The RL environment startup fills a critical gap in training advanced AI agents. The compute ramp involves 'scale-across' networking spanning over 2000km, enabling multiple data centers to act as a single supercomputer. The RL environment startup is described as emerging 'out of thin air,' indicating a sudden new entrant in the space.

Meta plans to start mass production of its self-designed AI chip, codenamed 'Iris,' in September 2026, aiming to double its overall AI computing capacity to 14 GW by 2027. This move reduces Meta’s reliance on external suppliers like Nvidia and AMD, potentially reshaping the AI hardware market and lowering costs for large-scale AI training and inference. The chip, part of the MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator) fourth-generation project, was developed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC, passing tests in only six weeks without significant issues.

Meta is planning to sell excess AI computing capacity and model services to external customers, signaling a potential entry into the cloud computing market. This news, combined with Apple's discussions to source chips from Chinese memory suppliers YMTC and CXMT, triggered a sharp sell-off in South Korean chipmakers like Samsung and SK Hynix. This development raises concerns about a potential slowdown in AI infrastructure investment by big tech, which could lead to oversupply of AI chips and memory components. It also threatens the dominance of South Korean memory leaders as Apple diversifies its supply chain to Chinese alternatives. The Kospi index fell up to 7% on July 2, 2026, with Samsung and SK Hynix dropping at least 8%, prompting a temporary halt in programmatic selling of Kospi futures. Apple is reportedly in talks with YMTC (NAND flash) and CXMT (DRAM) for chips used in devices sold in China.