Meta Platforms Inc. plans to invest over 10 billion USD in a startup in the field of data processing for training artificial intelligence (AI) Scale AI, which would become the largest deal in the industry for external financing for the holding company of Mark Zuckerberg, reported ag. Bloomberg, citing its sources.
The management of both companies continues negotiations, the individual terms of the deal may still change, but there is already a fundamental agreement to conclude an investment agreement by both parties.
Such an agreement would be a very atypical step for Meta, since until now the corporation relied on internal capacities and research, investing in its own projects. Meta's competitors have already concluded deals for external investments: Microsoft invested 13 billion USD in OpenAI, and Amazon invested in Anthropic. At the same time, competing companies provided investments in the form of loans and free use of their own computing power. Meta does not have such capacity, so we will mainly talk about direct financial injections.
Founded in 2016, Scale AI occupies a key place in the market for pre-processing large data sets for training generative AI, the quality of which determines the quality of the AI models themselves. Meta needs these investments to achieve its goals of developing its own models, primarily the language model Llama, a chatbot based on which is already used by more than 1 billion people via Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta and Scale AI have recently activated their work in the defense sector, having signed several contracts with American military-industrial corporations to develop AI for military purposes.