Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. has finalized a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI — taking a 49% stake — and recruited the company’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, 28, to join its AI team for producing data models.
Scale offers data services to help companies, including Meta and OpenAI, train and improve their AI systems. It also builds custom AI applications for businesses and governments. The startup generated approximately $870 million in revenue in 2024 and is expected to reach $2 billion in revenue by the end of this year. Its new interim CEO will be Jason Droege.
Zuckerberg was frustrated with Meta’s progress following the rollout in April of the company’s latest large language model, Llama 4. Not wanting to be left behind, the CEO of Meta took a more hands-on approach, making the recruitment of AI experts and scientists a top priority.
He has been offering lucrative pay packages to attract top researchers from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and startup Sesame AI Inc. He has been following a playbook similar to Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Google, with arrangements designed to avoid the regulatory scrutiny that comes with significant acquisitions.
Alphabet’s Google, the largest customer of Scale AI, announced it would cut ties with Scale after rival Meta bought a 49% stake in the AI data-labeling startup.
Google was paying Scale approximately $200 million this year for the human-labeled training data, which is crucial for developing technology, including the sophisticated AI models that power Gemini, its ChatGPT competitor, one of the sources said.
