Meta Invests $15 Billion in Scale AI, Doubling the Start-Up’s Valuation

Meta has invested $15 billion in data-labeling company Scale AI, valuing the startup at $29 billion—double its valuation from the previous year. As part of the deal, Meta will acquire a 49% equity stake in Scale and bring on board its co-founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, to work on Meta's AI initiatives. His official title at Meta has not yet been disclosed, though he will retain a seat on Scale’s board. Jason Droege, former Uber Eats leader, will serve as Scale's chief strategy officer.

The investment is part of Meta's broader push to strengthen its AI capabilities amid fierce competition for top talent and data infrastructure. Scale, which provides labeled training data to improve AI model performance, said it will expand its commercial relationship with Meta to accelerate the deployment of its solutions. This move mirrors similar strategies by other tech giants. For example, Microsoft paid $650 million last year to hire Inflection AI’s leadership and license its technology, while Google spent $2.7 billion on a similar arrangement with Character.AI. Meta has committed heavily to AI, allocating a large share of its projected $72 billion capital expenditure this year to data centers and servers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated that Meta aims to lead in AI performance by 2025, although its latest model, Llama 4, has reportedly underperformed in independent benchmarks. At the recent VivaTech conference, Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun emphasized that the company’s long-term ambition is to achieve and eventually surpass human-level intelligence, pushing toward the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Scale AI’s business foundation lies in data labeling—a meticulous, manual process that ensures images and text are correctly categorized before being used to train artificial intelligence models.

Founder Alexandr Wang has built strong connections with top figures in the tech world, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. While the company initially served autonomous vehicle clients, most of its projected $2 billion in revenue this year is expected to come from labeling data for training large-scale AI models developed by OpenAI and similar organizations. The recent investment deal with Meta is set to deliver major returns for Scale’s early backers. Venture firms like Accel, Tiger Global Management, and Index Ventures are among the key beneficiaries. Notably, Tiger Global’s $200 million investment is now valued at over $1 billion under Scale’s new $29 billion valuation, according to a source familiar with the matter.