AI Industry Soars: Snowflake-Anthropic, OpenAI-SoftBank, and Manus AI Acquisitions

In the past 48 hours, the AI industry shows robust dealmaking and investment momentum, with no major disruptions but steady enterprise adoption. Snowflake and Anthropic expanded their partnership on December 5, 2025, with a 200 million dollar multi-year deal to deploy Claude-powered AI agents on Snowflake Cortex AI, serving over 12,600 customers processing trillions of Claude tokens monthly.[1] This builds on prior integrations, enabling secure multi-step analysis for sectors like wealth management.

Major funding closed late last week: SoftBank finalized its 40 billion dollar investment in OpenAI on December 30, 2025, including a final 22.5 billion dollar tranche, one of the largest private tech commitments ever.[2] Meta acquired Singapore-based Manus AI for 2 to 3 billion dollars around December 29 to 30, 2025, integrating its general-purpose agent techdespite Chinese roots, as the startup hit 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue.[2][4]

In AI drug discovery, Insilico Medicine, freshly listed in Hong Kong, signed an up to 888 million dollar oncology deal with Servier in early January 2026, featuring 32 million dollars upfront, fitting the standard 2 to 5 percent front-loaded model seen in recent pacts like AstraZeneca-CSPC's 5.33 billion dollar immunology deal.[3]

Emerging partnerships include Kodiak AI's tie-up with Bosch to scale autonomous truck manufacturing, targeting driverless highway ops by late 2026, leveraging Bosch's sensor expertise.[5] No verified regulatory shifts or supply chain issues emerged, though Google highlighted 2026 agentic trends signaling the decline of basic chatbots.[4]

Compared to prior weeks, deal values escalated from Dutch startups' 1.3 billion euro rounds in 2025, with leaders like Snowflake using Claude internally for sales acceleration, showing enterprises prioritizing governed agentic AI over consumer tools.[1][6] Consumer behavior tilts toward agent execution, as in Manus tech, without noted price changes. Overall, funding surges signal confidence amid maturing infrastructure.

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI