Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, declared in January that he would invest up to $65 billion in AI-related projects this year, making it the company’s top priority.
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is negotiating with artificial intelligence startup Scale AI to invest several billion dollars in them. According to sources related to the matter, the cash might be worth over $10 billion, making it one of the biggest private company funding of all time.
The sources added that the terms of the deal have not been finalized yet and could still change.
Meta representatives and Scale AI did not respond to requests for comment.
Scale AI provides data labeling services to assist companies in training their machine-learning models. It is one of the significant beneficiaries of the generative AI boom. Microsoft and OpenAI are its clients. The IT giants Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta have sponsored Scale AI, a data labeling company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang. At 24 in 2021, he became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at that time.
When Microsoft and Meta funded a fundraising round in 2024, the startup’s value was around $14 billion. According to reports, the startup generated $870 million last year and anticipates that sales will more than double to US$2 billion by 2025. The report indicates that Scale AI is negotiating a bidding offer of $25 billion.
Many tech giants are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, claiming it is the future of technology, from Google and Amazon’s efforts to support competitor firm Anthropic to Microsoft’s $ 13 billion+ investments in OpenAI.
Sources claim that Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, declared in January that he would invest up to $65 billion in AI-related projects this year, making it the company’s top priority. Meta also aims to establish its Llama AI model (an open-source large language model ) as the industry standard, as its chatbot, which is available on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is used by 1 billion people every month.
It is a unique move and the biggest external AI investment to data for Meta. The social media giant has primarily relied on internal research and a more open development approach to advance its AI technology.
Scale AI plays a significant role in making artificial intelligence data accessible to companies. Since the success of AI training depends on the quality of the data, the company uses many contract workers to clean and tag text, photographs, and other data.
Scale AI and Meta both have interests in defense technology. Meta announced a new collaboration with defense contractor Anduril Industries last week. The two companies will collaborate to create goods for the US military, including an AI-powered helmet with augmented and virtual reality.
The company announced this after it restructured its generative AI team to speed up the development of its product and feature rollouts. Meta stated that the move, which involves splitting the team into two groups, is intended to enhance the company’s competitive edge in the quickly evolving AI business by streamlining processes and defining roles.
Meta has approved US government organizations and defense contractors to use its AI models.
The company is already working together with Scale AI on a project called Defence Llama, a military-use version of Meta’s Llama large language model (LLM).
In other AI news, PYMNTS published an article discussing how small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are using artificial intelligence to compete with larger companies.
According to the survey, artificial intelligence helps smaller businesses to quickly adopt an AI-first business model and let go of their old systems by automating procedures, enhancing skills, and speeding up decision-making.