Meta Platforms is on the verge of leading one of the largest funding rounds in the history of privately held technology companies.

For Meta, it would be the largest external investment in the AI sector to date. So far, the company has primarily relied on internal research and an open-source approach in developing its LLM family "Llama." With the possible involvement in Scale AI, Meta is now aligning with the strategy of other tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, who have invested billions in AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months—often linked to the use of their own cloud infrastructure. Meta, on the other hand, does not operate a cloud business, leaving the specifics of the investment open.

Scale AI, founded by Alexandr Wang in 2016, is considered a central enabler in the booming AI sector. The company generated around $870 million in revenue in 2023, with expectations to double to $2 billion by 2025. Its core business is the provision and manual preparation of training data, a critical bottleneck for the performance of AI models. Customers like Microsoft and OpenAI rely on the precision of the structured data provided by Scale.

Geopolitically, Scale is also gaining importance. The company maintains close ties with the US Department of Defense and develops AI technologies with military relevance. Recently, Scale received a major order to develop autonomous agent systems for the US Armed Forces. In parallel, Meta announced a partnership with defense company Anduril last week. At the center: a helmet equipped with artificial intelligence and augmented reality functions - part of a new defense program called "Defense Llama," based on Meta's LLM and developed in collaboration with Scale.

Zuckerberg's company is investing up to $65 billion in AI infrastructure this year. The Meta chatbot family with one billion monthly users, based on Llama, forms the operational backbone. An investment in Scale AI would substantially expand this strategic focus—both technologically and politically.