Meta in Talks for Record Investment in Data Labeling Leader Scale AI

Key Technology for Improving AI Accuracy: Data Labeling
Meta, Previously Focused on In-House Development, Takes an "Unusual Step"

Meta Platforms (hereafter Meta) is reportedly in discussions to make a large-scale investment in Scale AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup specializing in data labeling technology, according to Bloomberg News on June 8 (local time).

Reuters Yonhap News

Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, reported that the investment could exceed $10 billion (approximately 13.5 trillion won). If this happens, it would mark the largest external corporate investment related to AI in Meta's history.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, identified AI as the company's top priority in January and announced plans to spend $65 billion on AI-related projects this year. Founded in 2016, Scale AI is a data labeling service company that processes and organizes images, text, and other data so that AI models can learn autonomously. Its clients include Microsoft (MS) and OpenAI.

Previously, Bloomberg reported that Scale AI was valued at $14 billion last year, and that a public share buyback at a $25 billion valuation is being discussed this year. Scale AI's revenue last year was $870 million, and there are projections that this year's revenue could reach $2 billion, driven by growing demand for investments in AI models that mimic human reasoning.

Meta has so far focused on in-house research or open-source development strategies in the field of AI rather than making external investments, so this potential move is seen as an unusual step. In contrast, other big tech companies have been actively investing in startups.

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, while Amazon and Alphabet, Google's parent company, have poured billions of dollars into Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI. These big tech investments have typically taken the form of providing computing power, but since Meta does not operate a cloud business, it is still unclear how Meta would structure its investment in Scale AI.

Both Meta and Scale AI share an interest in the defense sector and are already collaborating on the Defense Llama program, a military version of Meta's large language model (LLM) Llama. In addition, Scale AI signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense earlier this year to develop AI agent technology.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.