Meta ‘In Talks’ For $10bn Scale AI Investment

Meta reportedly in talks to potentially invest more than $10bn in start-up Scale AI as artificial intelligence competition heats up

By Matthew Broersma,
2 min
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Meta Platforms is reportedly in talks to make an investment in artificial intelligence data start-up Scale AI that could amount to more than $10 billion (£7.4bn), Bloomberg reported.

Such a deal, if it went through, would be one of the largest private company funding events of all time, emphasising intense competition in the AI field.

The investment would also be Meta’s largest-ever external AI investment, after mostly relying on its own research in the past, along with an open-source development strategy for its Llama AI models.

A computer screen displays lines of code. Image credit: Unsplash
Image credit: Unsplash

Data cleaning

The report said the talks are still in progress and that plans could change.

Scale was last valued at about $14bn following a 2024 funding round that included Meta and Microsoft and this year has reportedly been in talks for a fresh round that could value it at $25bn.

Scale was founded in 2016 by chief executive Alexandr Wang and provides data-labelling services for companies training machine-learning systems.

Data inputs are a key resource for AI companies and play a critical role in determining the quality of generated results.

Scale taps into this requirement by hiring large numbers of contract workers to clean up and tag images, text and other data for use in AI training.

The company generated $870m in revenue last year and reportedly expects sales to more than double to $2bn this year.

Microsoft has invested more than $13bn in OpenAI while Amazon and Google have invested billions into competitor Anthropic.

But Meta’s AI investments to date have been largely internal, including vast expenditures on building data centres.

Broad reach

The company said in January it expected to spend up to $65bn this year on AI-related projects.

Meta has made AI a top priority and said last month its Meta AI chatbot assistant had risen to one billion monthly active users, boosted by its reach across Meta’s social media services.

The company said it is currently focusing on building the reach of Meta AI before building a business around the offering.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said monetisation strategies could include inserting paid recommendations or a subscription plan.