Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• The Thinking Game - 200 million views in one month

• Meta to buy Manus AI agent startup for $2B

• How AI agents will transform in 2026

• xAI’s ‘Colossus’ data center expanding to 2 gigawatts

Let’s get right into it!

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DOCUMENTARY

The Thinking Game - 200 million views in one month

The Thinking Game is a feature-length documentary filmed over five years that takes viewers inside Google DeepMind, following founder Demis Hassabis and his team as they pursue artificial general intelligence and tackle some of science’s hardest problems.

From DeepMind’s early successes in mastering complex strategy games to the emotional highs and lows of solving the decades-old protein folding challenge with AlphaFold—a breakthrough later recognized with a Nobel Prize—the film captures the rigor, uncertainty, and ambition behind major AI discoveries. Premiering at the Tribeca Festival and touring internationally, the documentary is now available to watch for free on the Google DeepMind YouTube channel in celebration of AlphaFold’s fifth anniversary.

AGENTS

Meta to buy Manus AI agent startup for $2B

Meta is acquiring Singapore-based AI startup Manus for about $2 billion, marking another major AI bet by Mark Zuckerberg and giving Meta a rare, revenue-generating AI product. Manus gained rapid attention after debuting AI agents for tasks like hiring, travel planning, and financial analysis, raised $75 million at a $500 million valuation led by Benchmark, and now claims millions of users and over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Meta plans to keep Manus operating independently while integrating its AI agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, helping justify Meta’s massive AI infrastructure spending. The deal carries geopolitical scrutiny because Manus’ founders originally established the company in Beijing before relocating to Singapore, prompting U.S. political concerns about Chinese ties; Meta has responded by stating that Manus will sever all Chinese ownership and cease operations in China following the acquisition.

AI INSIGHTS

How AI agents will transform in 2026

AI is shifting from conversational tools to systems that take action, as explored in this episode of Big Ideas 2026, which examines three forces shaping the next generation of AI products. Rather than focusing only on smarter models, the discussion highlights how software itself is changing form: interfaces move from chat and prompts to execution, design moves from human-first to machine-legible, and work moves toward agentic automation.

Insights from Marc Andrusko, Stephanie Zhang, and Olivia Moore show how AI is becoming proactive across workflows, readable and operable by other machines, and increasingly embodied in practical voice agents that can be deployed in real-world settings like healthcare, finance, and recruiting—signaling a future where AI is no longer something you ask, but something that simply does.

DATA CENTERS

xAI’s ‘Colossus’ data center expanding to 2 gigawatts

Elon Musk’s xAI is expanding its massive Memphis-area AI data center complex, Colossus, by purchasing a third nearby building that will be converted into a data center, boosting total computing capacity to nearly 2 gigawatts. The site, which already includes one operational facility and a second under construction, is designed to support hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs for training xAI’s Grok models and is located near dedicated power infrastructure, including a natural gas plant.

While the expansion has drawn scrutiny for its enormous energy and water demands, xAI says it is mitigating environmental impact by investing about $80 million in a wastewater treatment facility to recycle up to 13 million gallons per day. The project underscores Musk’s ambition to build the world’s largest AI training center, funded not personally but through aggressive fundraising, including $10 billion already raised and discussions for an additional $20 billion that could value xAI at more than $170 billion.