Meta On The Verge Of $15 Billion Deal With Scale AI: Report

Meta Platforms Inc META is considering a $15 billion investment in data-labelling startup Scale AI and hiring the group’s co-founder, Alexandr Wang, and top researchers.

The deal, likely by Wednesday, would give Meta a 49% ownership in Scale AI and value the startup at $28 billion, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

Prior reports indicated Meta may invest over $10 billion in Scale AI.

Also Read: Meta Hits 1 Billion Monthly AI Users, Eyes Future With Subscriptions

The move marks Meta’s plan to build a “superintelligence” lab to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Meta’s latest large language model, Llama 4, failed to impress with its independent reasoning and coding benchmarks. Meanwhile, competitors such as Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have showcased advanced “reasoning” models.

Meta also faced competition from affordable open-source competitors like China’s DeepSeek.

In 2024, Meta rivals Microsoft paid $650 million to poach Inflection boss Mustafa Suleyman and their team and to license the startup’s technology. Google also spent $2.7 billion on a similar arrangement with Character AI.

Reportedly, Meta is considering a system that would enable brands to design and target ads using AI by the end of 2026. Meta’s current ad platform already uses AI to generate ad variations before targeting users on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta’s advertising business is already thriving, with ad impressions increasing by 5% and the average price per ad rising by 10% year-over-year, as reported in its first-quarter results.

Price Action: META stock was trading lower by 0.34% to $700.02 premarket at last check Wednesday.

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