TL;DR
- Meta is negotiating a multi-billion dollar investment in Scale AI, potentially exceeding $10 billion, per Bloomberg.
- The deal would mark Meta’s largest external AI investment to date.
- Scale AI provides data labeling services to AI giants like Microsoft and OpenAI.
- Revenue for Scale AI grew from $870 million in 2024 to a projected $2 billion in 2025.
- The company is behind Defense Llama, a military-grade LLM built on Meta’s Llama 3.
Meta Seeks Deeper AI Play with Massive Investment in Scale AI
In a move that could significantly shift the artificial intelligence landscape, Meta is reportedly in late-stage discussions to invest over $10 billion in Scale AI, a San Francisco-based data infrastructure company that powers AI model development through its advanced labeling services. If completed, this would be Meta’s largest external AI investment to date, and one of the biggest private company funding events ever.
The potential deal underscores Meta’s aggressive push into AI as it races against rivals such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic to dominate the next generation of large language models (LLMs) and machine learning platforms.
Scale AI: Powering the Brains Behind AI Models
Founded by Alexandr Wang, Scale AI has rapidly become a foundational player in the AI supply chain, offering annotated datasets to leading players including Microsoft and OpenAI. These datasets are crucial for the supervised learning that underpins modern LLMs.
Scale’s contractors — many based internationally — tag and structure vast volumes of unstructured data, transforming raw inputs into the labeled examples needed to train sophisticated models like GPT-4 and Meta’s Llama 3.
Despite its operational success, Scale AI has faced scrutiny over labor practices. A recent Department of Labor investigation into whether the company was misclassifying its contract workers was dropped, clearing the way for new investments without ongoing regulatory overhang.
Data Labeling Revenue Growth Accelerates
According to Bloomberg, Scale AI generated $870 million in revenue in 2024 and is on pace to more than double that figure to $2 billion by the end of 2025. These numbers position Scale as one of the few AI infrastructure firms that is both high-growth and revenue-generating — two rare characteristics in the still-nascent AI economy.
Scale AI Revenue Overview
| Year | Revenue (USD) |
| 2024 | $870 million |
| 2025 (est.) | $2 billion |
The firm is also said to have benefitted from growing interest in military-grade AI, particularly following the debut of its own LLM — Defense Llama — a proprietary system built on Meta’s Llama 3 foundation, customized for national defense applications.
Why This Deal Matters for Meta
Meta has previously backed Scale AI during its $1 billion Series F funding round, which valued the company at $13.8 billion. But this potential follow-up investment — rumored to surpass $10 billion — would mark a strategic escalation.
Meta’s Llama models are already open-source and widely adopted, especially in enterprise contexts. Investing heavily in Scale AI could streamline Meta’s access to high-quality training data, give it a competitive edge over OpenAI, and reinforce its commitment to AI infrastructure, not just models.
According to industry insiders, the move could allow Meta to:
- Deepen its control over the data pipelines that train future models.
- Secure privileged access to Scale’s military and commercial AI insights.
- Enhance the development pipeline for Llama 4 and beyond.
Meta’s AI strategy has become more diversified recently, including partnerships with chipmakers, the rollout of Meta AI in its platforms, and the release of new open-source LLMs.
The Competitive Landscape Is Heating Up
This development comes amid a surge in investments across the AI sector. In the past 12 months:
- Microsoft committed $10 billion to OpenAI.
- Amazon invested $4 billion into Anthropic.
- Nvidia continues to dominate with hardware and equity stakes in key AI startups.
If finalized, Meta’s bet on Scale AI could reposition it as the most serious AI infrastructure investor among Big Tech players, not just a model developer.
“Data labeling isn’t sexy, but it’s where the bottleneck in AI training lives,” said an unnamed investor cited by Bloomberg. “This deal puts Meta one step closer to controlling that bottleneck.”
Looking Ahead: Strategic Implications
While Meta’s consumer-facing products like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp remain its core profit centers, the company’s long-term trajectory is increasingly tied to its AI portfolio.
If Meta finalizes this investment, analysts believe it could:
- Lay the groundwork for Llama 4 to outperform proprietary models like GPT-5.
- Give Meta priority access to training pipelines in sensitive sectors like defense and healthcare.
- Potentially lead to a future acquisition of Scale AI.
With AI becoming central to search, advertising, virtual assistants, and autonomous systems, Meta’s aggressive posture may secure it a critical edge — especially if the company can consolidate both data and compute resources under its banner.
Conclusion
Meta’s discussions to invest over $10 billion in Scale AI represent more than just a financial maneuver. They reflect a broader shift toward controlling the underlying infrastructure of AI, from compute to data to training processes. If completed, this deal may become a defining moment not only for Meta but for the AI sector at large — solidifying a future where the biggest breakthroughs happen at the intersection of labeled data and cutting-edge models.
