China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) ordered the deal undone in April under its foreign investment security review mechanism, the country's rough equivalent of CFIUS in the U.S. It was the first time Beijing has forcibly reversed a completed cross-border AI acquisition, and the commission asserted jurisdiction despite Manus having moved its headquarters and core team from Beijing to Singapore in mid-2025.
The review sharpened in March, when authorities barred co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao from leaving mainland China, with the order reportedly requiring Manus's Chinese assets to be restored to their pre-acquisition state within weeks.
The order extends to AI companies and their engineers the same restrictions Beijing has been increasingly applying to silicon all year. Chinese regulators have held up Nvidia's H200 shipments even after Washington approved them, while DeepSeek launched its 1.6 trillion parameter V4 model on Huawei silicon . Manus drew comparisons to DeepSeek in Chinese state media as a symbol of domestic AI capability, which made its sale to a U.S. hyperscaler a test case Beijing evidently decided it couldn’t let stand.
A blocked fab or factory sale can simply be reversed by returning equity, equipment, and IP, though: Manu’s value sits in its model weights and engineering know-how, both of which have been freely flowing into Meta for the last six months. No ban or firewall can recall what Meta’s engineers have already learned from that, and Meta hasn’t yet said how it’ll demonstrate to the NDRC that Manus’s tech is out of its stack.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-cuts-manus-off-from-its-internal-systems-as-china-ordered-breakup-of-2-billion-ai-deal-begins#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.