Key Points
- Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, acquiring a 49% stake at a valuation of $29 billion.
- CEO Alexandr Wang will join Meta to lead a new unit focused on superintelligence.
- Meta aims to regain its AI dominance amid competition from OpenAI, Google, and other companies.
- Scale AI clients may reconsider partnerships, fearing conflicts due to Meta’s involvement.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has made a significant strategic move by investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI, securing a 49% stake in the data labeling startup. The investment values Scale AI at $29 billion and aims to accelerate Meta’s artificial intelligence ambitions. A major component of the deal is the recruitment of Scale’s 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, who will join Meta to lead its newly formed superintelligence unit.
Meta stated that the partnership would enhance collaboration in producing training data for AI models. “We will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models, and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” the company noted, without revealing financial details.
The move comes as Meta struggles to maintain its competitive edge in the AI space, facing stiff challenges from rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and China’s DeepSeek. By bringing in Wang, a dynamic business leader known more for execution than academic research, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting on a shift in leadership style akin to that of OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Wang, a former MIT dropout born to Chinese immigrant physicists, co-founded Scale in 2016. Under his leadership, Scale became a major player in the AI ecosystem by providing vast quantities of high-quality, labeled data essential for training generative models, such as ChatGPT. The company employs gig workers through subsidiaries like Remotasks and Outlier to manually label data at scale.
Wang will retain his seat on Scale’s board while chief strategy officer Jason Droege steps in as interim CEO. A few Scale employees will also transition to Meta alongside Wang. Meta does not plan to take a board seat in Scale.
While the deal offers a big win for investors like Accel and Index Ventures, concerns linger about potential conflicts of interest. Competing AI labs that rely on Scale’s services may reconsider their partnerships if they fear that Meta will gain strategic insight into their operations.