Telegram, which a few years ago was trying to survive in the face of rapidly increasing costs and blocking, today officially enters the arena of global alliances with technological giants. Pavlo Durov, co-founder of the messenger announced about a one-year partnership with the company xAI — a subsidiary project of Elon Musk, which develops its own competitor ChatGPT — the Grok chatbot.
This agreement involves both financial infusions and a strategic convergence of the messenger with Musk’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The agreement provides for the receipt of $300 million to Telegram – part of this amount will come in cash, the other part – in the form of a share in the equity capital of xAI. In addition, Telegram will receive half of the revenue from Grok subscriptions, which will be sold directly through the messenger. According to Durov himself, access to Grok will be opened already this summer.
Integrating Grok into Telegram means more than just convenient access to a chatbot inside the app. Telegram is effectively licensed to broadcast AI functionality to its audience — more than 900 million users worldwide — with the ability to monetize that interaction.
According to the structure of the agreement, Grok will get direct access to the huge mass of Telegram users without the need to run separate web interfaces or applications. At the same time, Telegram will receive a part of the profit – both in the form of cash and in the form of a long-term partnership, which is important in view of the company’s plans to go public in 2026.
Telegram, which a year ago sold bonds worth more than $1.5 billion, turned a profit for the first time in its history. For 2024, according to the Financial Times, the messenger received $1.4 billion in revenue and $540 million in net profit. This year, the company has ambitious plans to raise revenue to $2 billion and profit to $720 million. In this context, the deal with Musk is not just a gift, but a lever that can secure profitability in the long term.
In addition to finances, Telegram receives a new element of positioning — as not just a secure messenger, but a platform with built-in AI. This factor could change the market — especially with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta developing their products within separate ecosystems, while Telegram becomes the first global messenger to directly integrate a powerful neural network developed outside of Big Tech.
Created as Musk’s answer to ChatGPT, the Grok chatbot is known for a more free-flowing communication style, fewer filters, and straightforward responses. Its training takes place on data from the social network X (formerly Twitter), which makes it flexible and reactive to current events.
Integrating Grok into Telegram could lead to users being able to communicate with AI directly in chats, create mini-bots based on it, automate message processing, or receive analytics. These features, depending on the implementation, may be partly free and partly tied to premium subscriptions. In addition, for xAI, it is access to a multilingual audience and a potential expansion of the language corpus that feeds the model itself.
