Elon Musk’s xAI Corp. will pay messaging app developer Telegram $300 million in cash and equity to broaden the reach of its Grok chatbot.

Telegram Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov announced the deal today in a post on X. Under the one-year agreement, the company will more extensively integrate Grok into its app. Telegram will receive half the revenue generated by Grok subscription sales.

Dubai-based Telegram claims that its messaging service has more than 1 billion monthly active users. The company makes money through advertising and a paid account tier called Telegram Premium. The subscription provides higher file upload limits, faster download speeds and other features for $4.99 per month.

Grok is already available in Telegram Premium. As part of the new partnership with xAI, the app developer will roll out the chatbot to all its users.

The X post in which Durov announced the deal today included a demo video of the upcoming Grok integration. Telegram will enable users to have the chatbot answer general knowledge questions, summarize documents and generate writing suggestions. It’s expected to become available this summer.

Grok is powered by an eponymous series of large language models developed by xAI. The newest addition to the series, Grok 3, debuted in February. It’s touted as being significantly better at reasoning tasks such as programming than xAI’s previous-generation LLMs.

The company trained Grok 3 using Colossus, an AI-optimized supercomputer that it launched last September. The system was initially equipped with 100,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics cards. Today, Colossus reportedly includes twice as many chips.

It’s unclear which LLM from the Grok model series will power the chatbot that xAI is integrating into Telegram. Because the chatbot will perform relatively simple tasks, it may not require the reasoning capabilities of the latest Grok 3 model. As a result, xAI might use a scaled-down version of the LLM or a previous-generation model with lower infrastructure requirements. 

The partnership with xAI reportedly comes amid an effort by Telegram to raise at least $1.5 billion in debt financing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal will see the company issue five-year bonds with a yield of 9%. Telegram is expected to use the funds to buy back debt issued through an earlier bond sale.

The app developer’s fundraising push comes two months after xAI acquired X, the social network previously known as Twitter, in an all-stock transaction. Musk stated at the time that the combined company is worth $80 billion. That’s $30 billion higher than the valuation xAI received after its most recent $6 billion funding round last December. 

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