On June 12, 2025, Meta’s investment in Scale AI was finalized: roughly $14.3 billion for a 49% stake, putting Scale’s valuation at about $29 billion. Scale confirmed the “significant” investment and confirmed that founder and CEO Alexandr Wang is stepping down.
It is one of the largest external AI bets Meta has ever made. For a company that raised $1 billion at a $13.8 billion valuation in 2024, the deal nearly doubles its valuation within two years and puts training data at the center of Big Tech strategy.
The Terms: $14.3 Billion for 49%
Combining CNBC’s and TechCrunch’s reporting: Meta invests roughly $14.3 billion for a 49% stake, and the reported figures put Scale’s valuation at $29 billion. Scale said the funds will go toward paying investors and shareholders plus growth. CNBC’s June 12 story had Meta finalizing the “nearly $14 billion” deal and cited The Information for the 49% figure; the same piece noted that the New York Times was first to report Meta’s superintelligence lab plans, while Bloomberg first reported the successor’s selection. In other words, on June 12 each outlet completed the same puzzle from its own sources.
The 49% number is itself informative — enough influence to make Meta a largest-shareholder-grade presence, deliberately kept short of a majority. The comparison with 2024 is stark: Scale then raised $1 billion from investors including Amazon and Meta at a $13.8 billion valuation; this time, Meta alone pushed it past $29 billion.
Wang Moves to Meta’s Superintelligence Effort
A Meta spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the partnership deepens the companies’ data-production work and that Wang “will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts.” He steps down as Scale’s CEO but stays on Scale’s board as a director, and some of his Scale colleagues are joining him at Meta. CNBC’s analysis cut to the point: after the weak reception of Meta’s latest Llama models, Zuckerberg is counting on the 28-year-old founder to boost Meta’s AI execution. Wang’s trademark is data-engineering execution — Scale turns human expert time into training and evaluation data, which is exactly the segment Meta needed to reinforce. For Meta, Wang brings not just himself but a ready-made data-engineering organization — an asset that counts immediately in the competition with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Scale’s Next Chief: Jason Droege
The successor is Jason Droege, previously Scale’s chief strategy officer. He joined the company in August 2024 and was before that a venture partner at Benchmark and a VP at Uber — a background spanning venture capital and operations, suited to a company that has to prove its neutrality to multiple customers at once. There is a notable wording difference between outlets: TechCrunch describes the appointment as interim in nature, while CNBC reported him directly as the new CEO. The constant in both is Scale’s pledge to stay independent, and the company’s public message agrees: this investment is not the start of a conversion into a Meta internal unit. Founded in 2016, Scale has long supplied training data to companies including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft — that customer list is the source of its value and, going forward, the asset it most needs to protect.
What It Means for the Industry
For Meta, the deal locks part of a data engine into its own camp — Scale’s training-data production is exactly what Meta needed to shore up after Llama 4. For Scale’s customers, supplier neutrality becomes a live variable in contract talks: the company feeding you training data now counts your competitor as its largest shareholder. The 49% structure also reads like deal politics — Meta gains near-majority influence while leaving Scale room to keep telling an independence story to everyone else. There is an organizational reality too: with some Scale employees moving to Meta, the team that stays has to show the core data-labeling business is unaffected — Droege’s first test in the job. The timeline is telling as well: CNBC wrote on the evening of June 12 that the deal was being finalized, and TechCrunch closed the loop the next day with Scale’s confirmation of a “significant” investment — the wording gap reflects the space between announcement and paperwork. What matters for users is how Scale’s product roadmap and customer list evolve over the next few quarters. With the transaction done, the data-labeling industry’s valuation anchor and customer strategies just got repriced, and the industry learned something broader: the competition over model quality has spread upstream into the data supply chain.
Sources
- Scale AI promotes strategy chief Droege to CEO as founder Wang heads for Meta — CNBC
- Scale AI confirms ‘significant’ investment from Meta, says CEO Alexandr Wang is leaving — TechCrunch
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.