Artificial Intelligence

Ai, Meta invests $14.3bn to take over 49% of Scale

Start-up CEO Alexandr Wang joins the social giant's Ai development team

13 June 2025

Il ceo di Scale Alexandr Wang: dopo l’investimento nella startup da parte di Zuckerberg, entra nel team intelligenza artificiale di Meta

2' min read

Meta is investing USD 14.3 billion in the artificial intelligence company Scale by hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang within its own Ai development team.

The announced deal reflects the drive of Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to revive artificial intelligence efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which faces stiff competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI.

Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday evening, 12 June. Scale said the $14.3 billion investment brings its market value to over $29 billion.

Scale emphasised, however, that it will remain an independent company, but the agreement will 'substantially expand the business relationship between Scale and Meta'. The latter will hold a 49 per cent stake in the start-up.

Wang, while joining Meta along with a small group of other Scale employees, will remain on Scale's board of directors. In his place is Scale's new interim ceo Jason Droege, who previously served as the company's chief strategy officer and also held management roles at Uber Eats and Axon.

Zuckerberg's growing focus on the abstract idea of 'super-intelligence' - which rival companies call general artificial intelligence - is the latest suggestion of a driving force that in 2021 staked everything on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company's name and investing billions to advance virtual reality and related technologies. Without, however, much market response.

It won't be the first time, since ChatGPT's debut in 2022 sparked a race to invest in artificial intelligence, that a major technology company has snapped up talent and products from innovative Ai start-ups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key personnel from the start-up Inflection AI, including co-founder and ceo Mustafa Suleyman, who now heads Microsoft's AI division.

Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016.

That summer they obtained influential backing from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which at the time was led by Sam Altman, now CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a similar trajectory to Zuckerberg, who had left Harvard University to found Facebook more than a decade earlier.

Scale's idea is to use the human element to improve artificial intelligence systems, perhaps by helping autonomous driving systems detect potential dangers. General Motors and Toyota are among Scale's customers for this. Scale offers artificial intelligence developers a more customised version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

More recently, the growing commercialisation of large language models of AI - the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama - has led to a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to provide assistance to 'all major large language models', including those from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, helping to fine-tune training data and test performance. It is unclear what the agreement with Meta will mean for Scale's other customers.

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Ai, Meta invests $14.3bn to take over 49% of Scale

Start-up CEO Alexandr Wang joins the social giant's Ai development team

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