On June 10, Meta announced a $14.8 billion action to invest in Scale AI to acquire a 49% minority stake in the company, coinciding with Facebook-parent’s launch of a new focused on pursuing superintelligence, led by Scale’s CEO Alexandr Wang, who will head a 50-person team within Meta, according to the New York Times.
The Meta Scale AI investment effort comes as Meta seeks to counter growing perceptions that it has fallen behind rivals. Its Llama 4 large language models, launched in April, underwhelmed performance benchmarks, raising doubts about Meta’s progress in the field.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has been aggressively courting top-tier AI researchers, hosting them at his Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe homes and offering seven-to-nine figure remuneration. Zuck’s plan is to create a new superintelligence team of around 50 experts.
Co-founder and CEO of Scale AI Inc, Alexandr Wang, is expected to join Meta’s new superintelligence lab, along with several other employees from the startup, according to The Information.
In addition to those concerns, the company has been reported to postpone releasing its flagship Behemoth AI model because of its functions, according to The Wall Street Journal in May.
On the other hand, Meta continues to face regulatory scrutiny with ongoing antitrust attention on its past Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.
The rise in Scale AI valuation reflects its revenue growth. The company is reportedly on track to generate over $2 billion in sales by the end of the year, up from $870 million in 2024.
Wang’s move to invest in Scale AI put the company may value at around $25 billion. Scale AI was previously valued at $13.8 billion during its most recent funding round last year, which included participation from Meta, Nvidia, and other major tech firms.
AI Investment Goals Aligning
Meta’s investment in Scale AI is a strategic goals’ alignment directed toward the development in building base models and developing Scale AI AGI with its work on LLaMA and the new superintelligence lab, depending on large amounts of labeled data to train and refine its models.
Scale AI data labelling specializes in high quality data annotation, synthetic data, and scaling infrastructure for AI development. With investment in Scale AI, Meta gains not only access to an important layer of the AI supply chain but also top-notch technical talent with Wang and his team, stepping up its own hunt to compete at the AI research.
Meta’s $14.8 billion investment comes also at a time when Meta finds itself under pressure to keep pace with its own Scale AI competitors.
Meta’s competitors like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all made rapid progress in the domain of generative AI. Microsoft’s extensive integration of OpenAI, and Google’s progress through Gemini and DeepMind, have put Meta to task in trying to make an equivalent contribution in the same area.
With Behemoth delayed and LLaMA 4 still in development, Meta’s seeking to invest in Scale AI is seen by experts as a strategic calculated gamble to secure one of the most essential backend enablers in the modern AI ecosystem.
Scale AI’s projected $2 billion in 2025 revenue makes it higher stakes bet, but one that might restore Meta’s position in the strengthening AI race.
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