San Francisco:
Meta Platforms Inc. is reportedly in discussions to make a massive investment—potentially exceeding $10 billion—in artificial intelligence startup Scale AI, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. If finalized, this would mark one of the largest private funding rounds in history and Meta’s biggest-ever external AI investment.
While terms of the deal are still under negotiation and subject to change, the move underscores Meta’s growing commitment to advancing AI capabilities. Both companies declined to comment publicly on the matter.
Scale AI, founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang, specializes in data labeling services essential for training machine-learning models. Its client list includes major names like Microsoft and OpenAI. The company was last valued at around $14 billion in 2024, and earlier this year was in talks for a tender offer that could raise its valuation to $25 billion.
The potential investment marks a strategic pivot for Meta, which has historically focused on in-house AI research and open-source models. Unlike peers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, which have heavily funded startups like OpenAI and Anthropic—often through cloud credit deals—Meta lacks a cloud services arm, leaving the structure of its proposed Scale AI investment still unclear.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a central focus for Meta in 2025, pledging up to $65 billion in AI-related spending this year. This includes pushing Meta’s Llama model toward becoming an industry benchmark and expanding the reach of its AI chatbot, which is now integrated across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and used by over a billion people monthly.
The partnership between Meta and Scale already extends into defense applications. They are jointly working on “Defense Llama,” a specialized version of Meta’s Llama large language model for military use. Meta recently partnered with defense contractor Anduril Industries and has permitted government agencies to use its AI technologies.
Scale AI, which reported $870 million in revenue last year and projects to surpass $2 billion in 2025, has also secured contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop AI agent systems, positioning itself as a growing force in national defense AI innovation.
