Meta Pours $14.3B Into Scale AI as 28-Year-Old Alexandr Wang Takes Over Superintelligence Labs
In June 2025 Meta bought 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion and recruited its CEO — the most expensive shot in the AI talent war.
Per Reuters and The New York Times, Meta finalized a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI in June 2025, taking a 49% non-voting stake and valuing the data-labeling firm at $29 billion — Meta's largest external investment ever.
The deal was about people: 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang joined Meta to run the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs.
The Structure: Why 49% and Non-Voting
No control, no votes — the design serves two goals at once: staying under antitrust filing thresholds, and converting the money into a signing bonus, because what Meta really bought was Wang and his core team. It mirrors Google's $2.4 billion 'license fee' extraction of Windsurf's founders the same month (see our coverage): when talent is worth more than the company, M&A is being displaced by the stake-plus-hire hybrid. The side effect landed immediately: OpenAI, Google and other customers cut orders over data-neutrality concerns, hitting Scale's core business.
The Nine-Figure Hiring Spree
In the months that followed, Zuckerberg personally ran the recruiting board, poaching researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind with nine-figure packages — some offers reportedly reaching $100M+ over four years. Top AI researchers were repriced from star engineer to professional athlete. OpenAI publicly likened it to 'someone breaking into our home,' and the talent defense war became the industry's subplot for the second half of 2025.
The Llama 4 Backdrop
The gamble was born of anxiety: Llama 4 underwhelmed at launch, the flagship Behemoth stalled, and the open-source lead was slipping to DeepSeek and Qwen (see our coverage). Against rivals — OpenAI with Microsoft's compute and distribution, Google with TPUs and DeepMind — Meta's card is cash flow, and it chose to slam that card down on the talent market.
Our Take
Whether capital density can buy back time depends on whether elite researchers' output actually transfers with the org chart — history offers both successes and failures for the buy-the-team play. Either way, the deal rewrote two industry rules: top AI talent has been permanently repriced, and the neutrality myth of third-party data services ended the day the biggest labeling vendor took a strategic investor.
This article aggregates official announcements and public reporting; original sources are linked below.
Source:路透社