Telegram and xAI strike $300 million deal to bring Grok AI to platform

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced on Wednesday that the company has teamed up with Elon Musk’s xAI to bring the AI chatbot Grok to the messaging platform.

Durov wrote that he and Musk have agreed to a one-year partnership to bring Grok to Telegram’s users, and Grok will be integrated across all Telegram apps. "This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50% of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram," Durov wrote. 

A video posted by Durov stated that the partnership will see Grok pinned for all users on Telegram, will appear in the search bar when asking a question, provide message editing and chat summaries, summarize documents posted in Telegram chats, and can serve as a moderator. The inclusion of Grok will begin in the "summer of 2025," the video stated. 

In late March, Musk announced that xAI had acquired the social media platform X in an "all-stock transaction." He said the combining of these two companies "values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt)."

"Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale," Musk wrote.

"xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach," Musk wrote. "The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge. This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress."