Meta pays $14.3 billion for half of Scale AI and its founder

Meta announced it would invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI, the data-labelling company Alexandr Wang had built since dropping out of MIT, in exchange for a 49% stake that carried no voting power. The investment valued Scale at more than $29 billion. As part of the deal, Wang left Scale to join Meta, taking on the newly created role of Chief AI Officer at age 28; Scale promoted its chief strategy officer, Jason Droege, to succeed him as chief executive, with the company continuing to operate independently of Meta.

Scale AI had built its business supplying the human-labelled and human-evaluated training data that frontier labs, including OpenAI and Google, relied on to train and fine-tune their models — work that depended on those customers trusting Scale to keep their data and model details confidential from competitors. Meta’s stake, and Wang’s departure to a rival lab, immediately complicated that trust: OpenAI said within days that it would phase out its work with Scale, and Google was reported to be planning to reduce its own reliance on the company, its largest customer. Rivals including Mercor and Handshake reported a surge in demand from labs looking to move data-labelling work away from a company partly owned by Meta.

The transaction was structured as an investment rather than an acquisition, a pattern also used by other AI labs that year — including Google’s arrangement with Character.AI and Microsoft’s with Inflection AI — to bring in a founder and key staff without buying the underlying company outright or triggering the same regulatory scrutiny as a full acquisition. Wang’s arrival set up Meta’s broader reorganisation of its AI efforts under a new Superintelligence Labs unit three weeks later.