Meta is paying $14.3 billion to acquire 49 percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to revamp its troubled AI efforts.

According to an announcement on Thursday, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg while maintaining his position on Scale’s board of directors. Sources indicate that Wang will be heading up a new AI lab at Meta, which is focused on the development of “superintelligence.” Meta’s spokesperson, Ashley Zandy, mentioned that more details about this endeavor and the talented individuals joining the team will be revealed soon.

It has been reported that Zuckerberg is actively assembling a fresh team of researchers from competing companies to bolster Wang’s team. According to insiders and media reports, Zuckerberg is personally reaching out to potential team members—often through a straightforward email or a WhatsApp message—and persuading some individuals to leave companies like Google by offering them lucrative compensation packages ranging from seven to eight figures.

Scale collaborates with companies such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, among others, to enhance the training of their models by providing human-annotated and labeled data. This work is largely carried out via affordable labor located outside the United States and has become a crucial facet of AI progress. With Wang’s transition to Meta, Scale has appointed Jason Droege, their former chief strategy officer, as the interim CEO.

“We’ve grown to over 1,500 people and become the trusted partner for model builders, enterprises, and governments building and deploying the smartest Al tools and applications,” Wang, who at age 21 became known as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire because of his stake in the company, said in a memo to Scale employees.

“Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world, accelerating the development of what may be the most important technology in human history. Today, we are announcing a massive new investment from Meta. This is a major milestone and a powerful validation of the hard work you’ve all put into Scale’s mission.”

Wang added that the “proceeds from Meta’s investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders, while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders.”

By not fully acquiring Scale, Meta is following Big Tech’s established playbook of hiring key AI talent while also investing in their startups. This process is designed to reduce the risk of antitrust scrutiny; however, the deal with Scale is likely to still be scrutinized by governments, even though Meta will receive only non-voting shares in the company.

This year, Scale signed a deal with the Department of Defense for a first-of-its-kind AI agent program for US military planning. Since then, it has expanded its business with other governments, recently inking a five-year deal to provide AI tools to Qatar. The company’s work with governments in Asia and Europe could result in a sizable portion of its overall sales over the next two quarters.

Meta, meanwhile, just went to trial to defend itself from being broken up by the US government. The outcome of that case is still uncertain.

Since the disappointing debut of Llama 4 earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been eager to catch up with competitors like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Llama 4’s release was delayed multiple times, and then Meta was caught gaming a public leaderboard to make the model appear better than it actually was. The company has still not released Llama 4 Behemoth, its largest and most expensive version that was teased in April.

Last month, Zuckerberg said that two of Meta’s top priorities for 2025 are making its ChatGPT rival, Meta AI, “the leading personal AI” and “building full general intelligence.” He recently stated that Meta AI has reached one billion monthly users, although the prominence of the assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook heavily influences this number.

In April, Meta released a standalone app for Meta AI, featuring a social feed that showcases how people are using it. The app briefly reached the top of the App Store but hasn’t sustained that level of popularity.