Meta Pays $14.3 Billion for 49% of Scale AI, Taps CEO to Run New Lab

Meta Platforms has completed a $14.3 billion investment for a 49 percent non-voting stake in data-labelling specialist Scale AI, giving the San Francisco startup a post-money valuation of roughly $29 billion. The cash commitment is Meta’s second-largest deal after its 2014 WhatsApp acquisition and is intended to deepen the social-media group’s access to training data for large language models.

People familiar with the terms said Meta will pay Scale at least $450 million a year for five years for data services, while Scale shareholders will receive a dividend of about $12.8 billion. The arrangement leaves Scale independent under new chief executive Jason Droege, with Meta holding a minority, non-voting position.

Scale founder Alexandr Wang, 28, is joining Meta as chief AI officer. Mark Zuckerberg has put Wang and former GitHub chief Nat Friedman in charge of a newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs unit that consolidates the company’s foundation-model work, FAIR research group and applied-AI product teams. In an internal memo, Zuckerberg said the lab aims to push toward ‘personal superintelligence’ and will recruit talent from rivals OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

The move underscores the escalating cost and talent war among big technology groups racing to build more capable generative-AI systems. Bloomberg reported that Apple has held early-stage internal discussions about bidding for AI-search startup Perplexity AI, valued at about $14 billion, after Meta explored a similar takeover earlier this year before opting for the Scale stake.