Meta's 14.3 billion investment triggers a wave of customer exodus from Scale AI

Recently, it was reported that a strategic investment of up to $14.3 billion is causing the AI ​​data unicorn Scale AI to fall into an unexpected customer loss crisis. After Meta announced the acquisition of its 49% stake, the data labeling giant, whose valuation soared to $29 billion, suddenly faced the dilemma of the collective withdrawal of core customers. According to Reuters, Google originally planned to pay Scale up to $200 million in data service fees this year, but has now urgently turned to its competitors to negotiate cooperation and plans to cut off most of its business dealings.

The chain reaction continues to spread. Microsoft followed suit to reduce the scale of cooperation, and OpenAI had quietly transferred part of its business as early as a few months ago. Although OpenAI's chief financial officer stated that Scale would be retained as one of its suppliers, industry analysts pointed out that the speed of customer loss was far faster than expected-competitor Labelbox expected to receive "hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer orders" by the end of the year, and another company Handshake revealed that the number of consultations had tripled. The root cause of this withdrawal storm lies in the game of data sovereignty: when customers share proprietary data and product prototypes with Scale, Meta, which holds a 49% stake, has essentially become a "competitor shareholder" of these technology giants. Google insiders admit that continuing the cooperation is equivalent to exposing the technology roadmap to the number one rival.

Interestingly, the customer withdrawal wave coincided with Meta's in-depth layout. In addition to the huge capital injection, Meta also poached Scale's 28-year-old CEO Alexander Wang, who led the "Super Intelligence" laboratory and reported directly to Zuckerberg. Analysts believe that this move exposes Meta's technical anxiety in the AI ​​competition - its self-developed Llama model was internally rated as "behind industry standards", and even had to purchase competitor Claude's model development programming assistant Devmate. In the face of the crisis, a Scale spokesperson insisted that the business remained strong and would operate independently, but market concerns were difficult to calm down. As the consensus on "neutrality" in the data annotation industry was broken, this collapse of trust caused by capital may reshape the supply chain pattern of the AI ​​industry.