Elon Musk’s xAI Invests $300 Million to Partner with Telegram, Aiming to Reach 1 Billion Users

TradingKey – Amid the global trend of integrating social media with artificial intelligence, Elon Musk’s xAI has announced a major collaboration with Telegram, one of the world's leading messaging platforms. Under the agreement, xAI will invest USD 300 million in cash and equity, aiming to leverage Telegram’s massive user base to promote its AI product, Grok.

【Source: X】

Currently, Telegram boasts over 1 billion active users, significantly surpassing X’s 600 million monthly active users. It holds particularly strong penetration in markets such as India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Russia—offering xAI extensive access to new user segments.

Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, stated that starting this summer, users will be able to directly access AI-powered features based on Grok within the app, including auto-expanded replies, group chat summarization, and real-time fact-checking.

Additionally, both parties plan to split revenue from Grok subscriptions sold via Telegram on a 50-50 basis, indicating that the partnership extends beyond technical integration to include a clear commercialization strategy.

【Source: X】

When asked whether Telegram would open up user data for model training, Durov clearly responded, “That hasn’t been discussed.” This suggests the collaboration primarily focuses on channel integration rather than deep data sharing.

By comparison, platforms like Meta and X have already opened up portions of user-generated content for AI training, in response to shortages in training datasets.

Looking ahead, Musk aims to enrich xAI’s external data resources through this partnership and feed them back into X, creating a synergistic enhancement between AI and the social media ecosystem. This could help establish a closed-loop system of “data–model–product.”

However, this vision faces real-world challenges including privacy concerns, platform competition barriers, and increasingly stringent global regulatory scrutiny. If Musk can strike the right balance between compliance and innovation, such cross-platform data collaboration may reshape the future landscape of AI and social media.