In 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a bold move as he appointed 28-year-old Alexandr Wang who founder of Scale AI to lead Meta’s entire AI operation. As part of the deal, Meta invested about US$ 14.3 billion in Scale AI, making it one of the largest such acquisitions in recent AI history.
From MIT Dropout to AI Startup Founder
Alexander Wang’s journey reads like a classic Silicon Valley success story. He was born in New Mexico to Chinese immigrant physicists, he displayed an early talent for math and computer science. He enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but dropped out in 2016 to found Scale AI by betting on the rising demand for quality annotated data to train machine-learning models.
Scale AI quickly became important for major technology companies since it supplied labeled data to clients such as NVIDIA, Amazon, and even Meta itself. By 2024, the startup had reached a valuation of nearly US$ 14 billion, establishing Wang as one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the AI industry.
Taking Charge of Meta Superintelligence Labs
With Meta’s massive investment in Scale AI, Alexander Wang didn’t just join the company, he became the leading man behind a newly formed division that is Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Under this umbrella, Alexander Wang oversees all of Meta’s AI research, infrastructure, and product development.
In a memo circulated internally, Alexander Wang wrote “Superintelligence is coming, and in order to take it seriously, we need to organize around the key areas that will be critical to reach it by research, product, and infrastructure.”
He quickly restructured Meta’s vast AI efforts into four distinct focus areas to accelerate development of general-purpose, superintelligent systems.
Why the Move Matters and What’s at Stake?
Meta’s investment in Scale AI isn’t just about acquiring another company. The core value lies in Scale’s expertise in data-annotation pipelines and scalable training systems crucial building blocks for next-generation AI models. With these in hand, Meta gains a major advantage as it competes with other leading AI players such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
At the same time, this shift reflects Meta’s ambition to reach “superintelligence,” the next frontier in artificial intelligence. With Wang at the helm and the company’s resources behind him, Meta is betting big. But the outcome remains uncertain by balancing rapid AI innovation with ethical responsibility, safety, and regulatory scrutiny will be a significant challenge.
