On the same Sunday weekend as WWDC, another major AI story broke: on June 8, 2025, Bloomberg reported that Meta is in talks to make a multibillion-dollar investment into Scale AI, the data-labeling company. According to people familiar with the matter, the financing could exceed $10 billion in value.
If it lands at that size, it would rank among the largest private-company funding events of all time — written by a public company, not a venture fund. Bloomberg was careful to flag the caveats: terms are not finalized and could still change, and representatives for both Meta and Scale declined to comment.
Bloomberg: a deal that could top $10 billion
Bloomberg’s June 8 report set the baseline: a multibillion-dollar investment under discussion, with some of the people involved estimating the value could exceed $10 billion, which would make it one of the largest private-company funding events ever. The two caveats matter as much as the headline number — terms are not set, and neither company is commenting. The South China Morning Post carried the Bloomberg wire with the same figures, a sign the story had already swept the financial press by Sunday. Bloomberg’s wording matters too: it calls Scale an artificial-intelligence startup and frames the money as an investment, not a customer contract — a scale of commitment far beyond ordinary business for a data-labeling firm. TechCrunch’s same-day summary put the significance bluntly: at that size, this would be the largest external AI investment Meta has ever made.
Scale AI: the data engine behind model training
Scale AI’s core business is providing data-labeling services to companies that need to train AI models, led by its young founder-CEO Alexandr Wang. TechCrunch named Microsoft and OpenAI among its customers and noted that much of the labeling work is done by contractors. The South China Morning Post’s version stressed the same framing: the company provides data-labeling services that help businesses train machine-learning models, with Microsoft and OpenAI on the customer list.
The business has also drawn scrutiny: TechCrunch pointed out that the US Department of Labor recently dropped its investigation into whether Scale was misclassifying and underpaying employees. In short, Scale sells an upstream input to model quality — high-quality human-labeled data and evaluation, among the scarcest resources in frontier training and post-training work. The essence of the business is human expert time: contractors label and compare examples one by one, and quality management plus delivery speed are the competitive moat. The appearance and quiet drop of a Labor Department probe is itself a hint of the operation’s size — and for a buyer, investing in such a company is a direct way to turn an upstream supply into a resource it can influence.
What it means for Meta and the AI infrastructure map
For Meta, the strategic logic is extending its data supply chain upstream. Meta’s own Llama models need large volumes of high-quality data and human feedback, and Scale is one of the most prominent companies in that field — with a customer list that includes direct competitors in cloud and models. For the industry, a single investment of possibly more than $10 billion aimed at a data-labeling company signals that the scarce resources in the frontier AI race now extend beyond compute to data and human expert time. Timing is another tell: the story landed on a holiday-quiet WWDC weekend and still took over the financial pages. For Meta’s Llama roadmap, upstream data capacity is exactly the kind of input money can buy. If Bloomberg’s scale holds up, it would also reset expectations for what private-company financing looks like — a public company stepping in directly to push a data firm into the largest funding events on record.
Caveats: this is a ‘talks’ story
It bears repeating: as of June 8, this was a report based on anonymous sources. There are no confirmed terms, no confirmed valuation structure, neither company commented, and Bloomberg itself said the terms could still change. For developers and product decision-makers, the right posture is observation, not betting: watch the coming weeks for a formal agreement and for any change in Scale’s independence. Scale serves Microsoft, OpenAI, and many other customers at once, and a shift in its ownership could ripple through the neutrality of the entire data-labeling supply chain — which is exactly why this story is worth following. If a formal agreement emerges, expect fresh momentum in funding for data-quality and evaluation services — and neutrality clauses to become a standard ask in customer contracts.
Sources
- Meta in Talks for Scale AI Investment That Could Top $10 Billion — Bloomberg
- Meta reportedly in talks to invest billions of dollars in Scale AI — TechCrunch
- Meta in talks for Scale AI investment that could top US$10 billion — SCMP
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.