Meta has begun dismantling its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, completing an operational separation from the Chinese-founded AI startup and halting data sharing between the two companies. This is the most concrete step yet toward complying with a divestiture order Beijing issued roughly two months ago on national security grounds.

Meta has cut Manus off from its internal systems, Bloomberg reported, preventing employees from using Manus tools for internal projects as the two companies move toward a full separation.

Meanwhile, according to May reports, the co-founders of Manus have held preliminary discussions about raising approximately $1 billion from outside investors to reclaim the startup from Meta, a move that could pave the way for a Chinese joint venture structure and an eventual listing in Hong Kong, a venue that has seen a surge in AI listings this year for Chinese AI startups like MiniMax and Zhipu.

What was supposed to be a landmark exit for Chinese AI is quickly unraveling. The move underscores Beijing’s determination to retain control over strategically sensitive technology, regardless of a company’s offshore incorporation.

In addition to the forced divestiture, Chinese authorities have since expanded travel restrictions to researchers and executives at private firms, requiring government approval before heading abroad. China is also tightening its grip on foreign capital, with reports indicating that top AI firms, including Moonshot AI, StepFun, and ByteDance, will need government sign-off before accepting U.S. investment, adding another layer to Beijing’s sweeping effort to control its AI sector.

Even as Meta moves to sever ties with Manus, the agentic AI startup has continued to ship new features, rolling out integrations with Similarweb and Shopify.

Manus drew widespread attention with a viral agent demo relocated its staff to Singapore in mid-2025 before announcing a $2 billion acquisition by Meta in December. Chinese regulators moved to scrutinize the transaction earlier this year, citing potential violations of technology export controls and foreign investment rules.

Manus investors, including California-based venture firm Benchmark, have already received their proceeds from the acquisition, while Asian backers, including Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund, have indicated they will cooperate with the unwinding process, according to the WSJ.

Manus’ Chinese origins with parent company Butterfly Effect drew scrutiny on both sides of the Pacific, with Senator John Cornyn questioning whether American capital should flow to a Chinese-linked firm.

Meta and Manus did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.

BlackRock submitted an order to buy at least $5 billion in SpaceX shares ahead of Friday’s debut, the Wall Street Journal reported. That single order is nearly as large as the entire $5.5 billion Cerebras IPO, the biggest of 2026 so far. SpaceX has told banks it will not budge from its $135 per share price.

Total investor demand has reached $250 billion, making the offering nearly four times oversubscribed, according to Reuters. SpaceX plans to sell roughly 555.6 million shares, raising $75 billion at a valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion. Retail investors have requested over $70 billion worth of shares. Up to 30% of the IPO may be allocated to public buyers.

Allocated shares will be available through Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, and E*Trade. Fidelity lowered its minimum account balance for IPO access from $100,000 to $2,000. Schwab still requires $100,000. Robinhood, SoFi, and E*Trade have no stated minimum.

Not everyone is enthusiastic. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a 12-page letter to SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins requesting a delay. She argued the IPO’s size alone “would justify careful SEC review,” and raised concerns about SpaceX’s governance structure. Musk controls 85% of shareholder voting power through supervoting shares, mandatory arbitration, and Texas corporate law. Warren called it “unprecedented power” over investors who would have “significantly fewer rights than those traditionally offered.”

Market analysts have also pushed back on the valuation. Morningstar projected SpaceX should trade at $63 per share, roughly half the asking price. “Big Short” investor Michael Burry said there was “nothing” in the filing to suggest the company is worth $1 trillion, “let alone $2 trillion.” SpaceX valued its total addressable market at $28.5 trillion, a figure analysts called “nonsensical” and “smoke-and-mirrors accounting.”

The financials tell a mixed story. SpaceX disclosed a net loss of $4.28 billion through its latest quarter, after losing $4.94 billion in 2025. Starlink, which generated $4.69 billion in quarterly revenue, is the only profitable segment. The AI arm lost $2.5 billion. Capital expenditure hit $10.1 billion in the quarter, with $7.7 billion going to AI. SpaceX spent $12.7 billion on AI last year, compared to $3.8 billion on space.

If shares trade at $135, Musk’s 42% stake would be worth approximately $688 billion, making him the world’s first trillionaire when combined with his other holdings. SpaceX’s S-1 filing also revealed billionaire-making stakes for president Gwynne Shotwell ($1.6 billion), CFO Bret Johnson ($1.2 billion), and board members including Valor Equity’s Antonio Gracias, whose $4.8 billion net worth could surge by $68 billion.

The IPO arrives after a string of valuation adjustments and last-minute deals. SpaceX signed a $920 million monthly compute deal with Google and a $1.25 billion monthly deal with Anthropic in the weeks before the offering. Warren’s concern is that index funds will be forced to buy SpaceX stock, exposing millions of passive investors to “significant risks with no choice in the matter.”

SpaceX will disclose its final IPO price on Thursday. Trading begins Friday morning on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.

TL;DR

Former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer’s Gigascale Capital raised a $250 million fund focused on energy, grid infrastructure, and critical minerals startups. The fund bets that AI’s energy demands will make clean power startups the real winners of the AI boom.

Gigascale Capital, the venture firm led by former Meta chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer, has raised a $250 million fund to invest in energy, grid infrastructure, and critical minerals startups. The fund, announced on Monday, is Gigascale’s second and its first to include institutional investors. It arrives as most of the venture capital industry has pivoted away from climate tech and toward AI, making Schroepfer’s continued bet on the physical economy a deliberate contrarian move.

“The companies we back win because they’re cheaper, faster, and more reliable,” Schroepfer said. “Climate impact is the result of better-performing systems.” The framing is notable: Gigascale is positioning clean technology not as a values-driven investment thesis but as an economic inevitability driven by performance advantages.

AI is the catalyst, not the competitor

The irony of a former tech executive raising a climate fund during an AI boom is less contradictory than it appears. US utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion by 2030 to meet the electricity demands of AI data centres, which could consume 9% of the country’s total electricity by the end of the decade, up from 4% in 2023. Natural gas turbines, the default backup power source, have waitlists stretching into the early 2030s.

That power crunch creates the opening Gigascale is targeting. Companies that need massive amounts of electricity, whether for AI training, manufacturing, or industrial processes, cannot wait for utility-scale infrastructure to catch up. Startups building solutions to the data centre energy problem are already attracting significant capital, and Schroepfer has argued on podcasts that “bring-your-own power is going to be a competitive advantage over time” for energy-intensive businesses.

Gigascale’s existing portfolio reflects this thesis. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which raised $863 million from investors including Nvidia, Google, and Bill Gates, is developing commercial fusion reactors. Form Energy builds 100-hour iron-air batteries designed for grid-scale storage. Heron Power raised $140 million for grid infrastructure technology. These are not consumer apps. They are companies building the physical infrastructure that the digital economy requires.

Bucking the climate tech backlash

The $250 million raise is significant because it comes at a moment when much of the venture industry has abandoned the “climate tech” label. After a wave of high-profile climate-focused funds launched between 2020 and 2023, returns have been mixed and several prominent climate startups have struggled. European venture firms are raising large funds with broader mandates, and US investors have largely redirected capital toward AI-native companies.

Schroepfer started Gigascale after studying climate technology during the pandemic. His argument is that the sector’s problems are not technological but commercial: clean technologies need to be cheaper and faster than incumbents, not just greener. Solar energy is his reference case, a technology that won market share not because of environmental mandates but because it became the cheapest source of electricity in most of the world.

The fund will also look at critical minerals and what Schroepfer calls “physical AI,” a term that likely refers to robotics and automation applied to manufacturing, mining, and construction. Battery storage and mineral supply chains are increasingly recognised as bottlenecks in the energy transition, and startups that can address those constraints have a clearer path to revenue than companies building yet another solar panel.

The Meta connection

Schroepfer served as Meta’s CTO for more than a decade before stepping down in 2022. His tenure included oversight of the company’s infrastructure buildout, including the data centres that now consume massive amounts of electricity to run AI workloads. The experience gave him direct exposure to the energy constraints that large-scale computing faces, an understanding that informs Gigascale’s investment thesis.

Meta itself has become one of the largest corporate buyers of clean energy, with 2026 capital expenditure guidance between $125 billion and $145 billion, much of it directed toward AI infrastructure. The search for solutions to AI’s energy problem has produced ideas ranging from data centres in space to small modular nuclear reactors, but the most commercially viable answers are likely to come from startups building practical improvements to energy generation, storage, and distribution.

Gigascale’s $250 million is modest relative to the scale of the energy infrastructure challenge, but the fund’s contrarian positioning could prove well-timed. If the AI industry’s power consumption continues to accelerate and legacy energy infrastructure cannot keep up, the startups building the physical layer will capture value that no amount of software optimisation can replace.