Telegram to integrate xAI’s Grok in $300M deal

Telegram has reached a new partnership with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, securing a $300 million deal to integrate the company’s chatbot, Grok, into its messaging platform. The agreement includes both cash and equity components and spans a one-year term, during which Grok will be incorporated across Telegram’s applications.

As part of the arrangement, Telegram will distribute Grok via its platform and receive 50% of the revenue generated from xAI subscriptions purchased through the app. This initiative follows the earlier rollout of Grok to Telegram Premium users and signals a broader availability of the chatbot to the app’s full user base.

The integration, previewed in a video shared by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, showcases Grok’s functionality embedded in the app’s interface. Features include pinning the chatbot atop conversations, using it through the search bar, and leveraging it for tasks such as summarizing chats and documents, drafting messages, creating stickers, and assisting with content moderation and business queries.

The strategic deal arrives as Telegram reports over 1 billion monthly active users globally. Founded in 2013 and now headquartered in Dubai, Telegram has positioned itself as a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream messaging apps. The company previously exited Russia after resisting demands to surrender user data during political unrest in Ukraine.

Grok, xAI’s generative AI product, competes with other major language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. It is also gaining traction in enterprise and governmental applications—recently being adopted by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency for data analysis. Additionally, Microsoft announced earlier this month that it would host Grok on its Azure AI Foundry platform.

xAI is in the midst of building a major AI infrastructure hub near Memphis, Tennessee, reportedly using one million Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to support its next-generation model training operations.