Meta has agreed to pay $14.3 billion for a 49 per cent non-voting stake in Scale AI, the data labelling company, in a deal that values Scale at $29 billion and brings its founder, Alexandr Wang, to Meta to lead a new unit working on “superintelligence”, a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that would outperform humans at all tasks.
Reuters reported the terms, citing two people familiar with the matter, and said the investment is the second largest in Meta’s history, after its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014.
Under the arrangement, Meta will not take a board seat at Scale or gain access to its customer data, a spokesperson for Scale said. Wang stays on Scale’s board, and Jason Droege, the company’s chief strategy officer, becomes interim chief executive.
The Deal
Meta said in a statement: “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 Guardian reported on 11 June that Meta was preparing the investment as part of an effort to pursue computerised superintelligence. Early reports had put the figure at $15 billion. The reported figure of $14.3 billion, and the $29 billion valuation, come from people familiar with the matter, and neither company has confirmed them.
Scale’s other shareholders keep the remaining 51 per cent, and Meta’s stake carries no votes. Meta gains a minority position in the company and a founder who will run its own AI unit, without control of Scale.
Who Is Alexandr Wang
Wang, 28, dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to found Scale in 2016. The company became a leading supplier of human-validated training data for AI models, the checked examples that those models learn from, and its customers include the AI labs building them. In March 2025 Scale signed a deal to build a system for the US defence department called ThunderForge, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was among its early backers.
At Meta, Wang will lead the superintelligence unit, which reports to Mark Zuckerberg. He keeps a seat on Scale’s board while leading the new unit from inside Meta.
Why Meta Did It
Meta was an early leader in open-source AI, but it has lost staff to rivals and postponed model launches as Google, OpenAI and other companies advanced. Zuckerberg is betting that a business operator, rather than a research scientist, can turn the company’s AI effort around.
Meta is buying less than half of Scale, without votes or a board seat, while hiring the company’s founder to run its own AI unit. The Guardian quoted one Silicon Valley analyst describing the move as “a wartime CEO”.
What Researchers Say
Michael Wooldridge, a professor at the University of Oxford, told the Guardian the reported deal “seems very much like an attempt by Meta to regain the initiative after the Metaverse didn’t take off. They invested spectacular amounts in that and it didn’t just fail, it was ridiculed”.
He said: “There’s a good argument that there should be a Cern for AI where governments collaborate to develop AI openly and robustly so we understand and trust the technology we are developing. That’s not going to happen if it’s developed behind closed doors.”
Andrew Rogoyski, of the University of Surrey, told the Guardian the deal reflects “that the AI companies are hoovering up AI talent from wherever they can get it, whether acquiring young AI companies, or hollowing out university AI departments”.
He added that Meta “are not quite as desperate to achieve AGI, so they can afford to take a longer view”. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a system able to match human performance across a range of tasks.
The Open Questions
No regulatory review of the investment has been confirmed, and no competition authority has announced an examination of it. It is not known whether Scale’s AI lab clients will keep using a business that Meta partly owns.
The deal is a windfall for Scale’s early investors, Accel and Index Ventures, which can sell half their stakes.
For now the terms rest on unnamed sources rather than company filings, and Meta describes the arrangement as a deepening of work on data for AI models.
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Sources: The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/11/meta-to-announce-15bn-investment-in-bid-to-achieve-computerised-superintelligence-ai; Reuters (via Investing.com), https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/meta-finalizes-investment-in-scale-ai-valuing-startup-at-29-billion-4094272; RTTNews (via Nasdaq), https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/meta-invests-143-bln-scale-ai-taps-ceo-alexandr-wang-lead-superintelligence-push
Photo: Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Meta (then Facebook) campus in Menlo Park, California. The photograph is not from the events described in the article.
