Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is reportedly in advanced discussions to invest more than US$10 billion (A$15.4 billion) in San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Scale AI.
This could be one of the largest private AI funding deals ever, according to a Bloomberg news story.
Although the details were still being finalised, such an investment would mark the largest external investment on AI to date by the parent company of Facebook.
Scale AI declined to comment on the deal, and Meta had not responded to media requests made outside regular business hours, according to a Reuters article.
Founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang, Scale AI specialises in data labelling services, which is a foundational component in training AI models and it helps major players like Microsoft and OpenAI develop high-quality datasets for machine learning applications.
The company is already backed by tech investors, including Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta itself, which previously participated in Scale’s $1 billion Series F round, which valued Scale AI at $13.8 billion.
According to Bloomberg, Scale AI generated $870 million in revenue in 2024 and is on track to hit $2 billion this year, positioning it among the most commercially successful private AI companies globally.
In addition to its core data labelling services, Scale AI also operates a global AI research platform with contributors from over 9,000 cities and towns, and recently developed Defense Llama, a large language model for military use built on Meta’s own Llama 3 architecture.
