Meta Platforms has completed a $14.3 billion purchase of a 49 percent non-voting stake in data-labelling specialist Scale AI, giving the San Francisco-based start-up a post-money valuation of about $29 billion. The deal is Meta’s second-largest transaction after its 2014 WhatsApp takeover and includes a commitment to pay Scale at least $450 million a year for data services over the next five years, according to Forbes.
Scale’s 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang will leave the chief executive post and join Meta as chief AI officer. Under the agreement, Scale will continue to operate independently while Meta absorbs Wang and a group of engineers to bolster its push into so-called superintelligence—AI systems that can match or surpass human capabilities.
Mark Zuckerberg detailed the next step in an internal memo on 30 June, unveiling “Meta Superintelligence Labs,” a new umbrella unit that merges the company’s foundation-model research, open-source projects such as Llama and applied-AI product teams. Wang will co-lead the group with former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman and supervise 11 recently recruited researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic.
To finance the heavy computing needs of the programme, Meta is in advanced talks to raise about $29 billion for U.S. data-centre construction, the Financial Times reported. The structure under discussion involves roughly $3 billion in equity and $26 billion in debt from private-credit investors including Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle and Pimco, with Morgan Stanley advising.
The investment spree highlights Meta’s urgency to narrow the gap with rivals OpenAI and Google after setbacks with its Llama 4 model and delays to a successor system dubbed “Behemoth.” Meta has already lifted its 2025 capital-expenditure forecast to as much as $72 billion, signalling that AI infrastructure—not its metaverse hardware—now dominates spending priorities.
Meta spent $14.8B for 49% stake in ScaleAI. SurgeAI seeks a valuation of $15B. Data labeling market is projected to grow from $3.0B in 2023 to $29B by 2032. @ReadyAI_, $TAO SN33, is the leading decentralized AI-driven data labeling platform, earning revenue TODAY. Study 3️⃣3️⃣.👇🏾👇🏾
Superintelligence Labs will house various teams under the Meta group, specifically focusing on AI model software including Llama, products, and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) projects.
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