Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that his company will be investing heavily in artificial intelligence in 2025. And on Thursday, he put his money where his mouth is, with the parent company of Facebook and Instagram investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI, a company that offers a platform and training data for developing AI models.
The investment values Scale AI at more than $29 billion, the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post. As part of the deal, 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, Scale’s chief executive and co-founder, will join Meta to spearhead its new AI research division now dubbed the “Superintelligence” lab.
Meta’s stock was down 0.77% on Friday, the morning after the deal was officially announced, to $688 per share. The company’s stock price is up about 15% since the start of the year.
The tech giant’s stake in Scale AI — its second-largest deal ever, after the $19 billion it spent to buy WhatsApp in 2014 — reinforces Zuckerberg’s claim that AI is a key focus for Meta moving forward. Zuckerberg in January said Meta would spend between $60 billion and $65 billion to “significantly” expand its AI team; the company then updated that projection during its first quarter earnings call in April, saying it planned on spending up to $72 billion this year on AI.
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in January. “I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our research and development efforts.”
The new superintelligence division will be separate from Reality Labs, Meta’s division that has been focused on virtual reality, augmented reality and AI. That division has stood out as one sector where Meta is spending more than it is making; the company reported it lost $4.21 billion on Reality Labs during the first quarter, while Meta overall reported $42.31 billion in sales.
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