Scale AI plans to promote Chief Strategy Officer Jason Droege to serve as its new CEO, with founder Alexandr Wang heading to Meta as part of a multibillion-dollar deal with the company, CNBC has confirmed.

Meta is finalizing a $14 billion investment into artificial intelligence startup Scale AI, CNBC reported earlier this week. Wang will help lead a new AI research lab at Meta and will be joined by some of his colleagues. The New York Times was first to report about the new AI lab.

Bloomberg first reported that Droege was picked to be the new CEO. CNBC confirmed Scale AI’s plans with a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of confidentiality. Scale AI and Droege didn’t respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

Droege joined Scale AI in August of 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to his role at the startup, he served as a venture partner at Benchmark and a vice president at Uber.

Founded in 2016, Scale AI has achieved a high profile in the industry by helping major tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft prepare data they use to train cutting-edge AI models. 

Meta has been pouring billions of dollars into AI, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been frustrated with its progress. Zuckerberg will be counting on Wang to better execute Meta’s AI ambitions following the tepid reception of the company’s latest Llama AI models.

Meta will take a 49% stake in Scale AI with its investment, The Information reported.

–CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report

Oracle shares soared 13% on Thursday to a record close, after the database software vendor issued robust earnings and a strong forecast, fueled by growth in cloud.

Revenue climbed 11% year over year during the fiscal fourth quarter to $15.9 billion, topping the $15.59 billion average estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.70 exceeded the average analyst estimate of $1.64.

“All told, ORCL has entered an entirely new wave of enterprise popularity that it has not seen since the Internet era in the late 90s,” Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note to clients. The firm was one of several to lift its price target on the stock, raising its prediction to $190 from $130.

Oracle has been making headway in the cloud infrastructure market to challenge Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It’s still small by comparison, with $3 billion in cloud revenue during the May quarter, compared with over $12 billion for Google, which counts productivity software subscriptions and cloud infrastructure sales when reporting cloud metrics. But Oracle’s business is growing faster.

Future expansion can also come from sales of Oracle’s database on clouds other than its own.

“The growth rate in multi-cloud is astonishing,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said on Wednesday’s conference call with analysts. “In other words, our database is now moving very rapidly to the cloud, I think because – a few reasons, because the database has now all these AI capabilities, but also, quite frankly, now people can get it in whatever cloud they want.”

Remaining performance obligations, a measurement of money that’s expected to be recognized as revenue in the future, sat at $138 billion, up 41% from a year earlier. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said RPO will likely more than double in the 2026 fiscal year, which ends in May 2026. Revenue for the new fiscal year should come in above $67 billion, she said. That’s higher than LSEG’s $65.18 billion consensus.

Gains from OpenAI’s Stargate artificial intelligence data center project, targeting $500 billion in investments over four years, are not yet included in forecasts.

“If Stargate turns out to be, everything is advertised, then we’ve understated our RPO growth,” Ellison said.

For fiscal 2029, revenue should be above the $104 billion target the company set in September, Catz said.

Still, the company faces the challenge of meeting client demand in cloud.

“Demand continues to dramatically outstrip supply,” Catz said, though she added that the company isn’t having trouble sourcing Nvidia graphics processing units.

Analysts at RBC, who recommend holding the stock, raised their price target to $195 to $145. But they noted that, “with the backdrop of continued capacity constraints, we struggle to see a path to meaningful acceleration in the near term.”

WATCH: Oracle shares hit record high

Chime shares jumped 37% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday after the provider of online banking services sold shares in an IPO that valued the company at $11.6 billion.

Late Wednesday, Chime raised about $700 million in its offering, and existing investors sold an additional $165 million worth of shares. The stock, trading under the ticker symbol CHYM, closed on Thursday at $37.11, up from its IPO price of $27. It’s market cap climbed to $13.5 billion.

Chime’s IPO, from a valuation perspective, represents a big step down from where venture investors like Sequoia Capital valued the company in its last fundraising round in 2021, when private tech markets were raging. The valuation at the time was $25 billion.

Still, Chime’s offering is the latest sign that the fintech IPO market is opening up after a multi-year freeze brought on by rising interest rates and valuation resets. Recent debuts from eToro and crypto company Circle have rekindled optimism in the sector, with both stocks seeing strong initial pops.

Chime reported $518.7 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, a 32% increase from a year earlier. Net income narrowed slightly to $12.9 million, down from $15.9 million in the same period last year.

CEO Chris Britt said Chime has built a loyal user base by serving Americans earning $100,000 a year or less, a group often overlooked by traditional banks.

“Two-thirds of our customer base use us as their direct deposit account and primary account relationship,” Britt told CNBC’s David Faber. “We help our members avoid fees, get access to short-term liquidity, build their credit and build their savings — and it’s that combination of services that really resonates and matters most to the everyday consumer.”

Britt said the company reached $25 million in adjusted profitability in the first quarter and has improved its adjusted profit margin by 40 points over the past two years.

The company’s top institutional shareholders are DST Global and Crosslink Capital. Iconiq was one of the firms that invested six years ago, when Chime raised money at a $1.5 billion valuation.

“We first invested in Chime in 2019 and continued to invest through subsequent rounds because of their singular, unwavering focus on serving everyday Americans — and the trust they’ve built with that core customer base,” Yoonkee Sull, general partner at Iconiq, said in an interview.

The average Chime customer completes more than 55 transactions per month using the Chime card and interacts with the app four to five times a day. Active member growth rose 23% in the first quarter from a year earlier, Britt said, with 8.6 million monthly active users and an increasing number turning to Chime to serve as their primary banking relationship.

Customer acquisition doesn’t come cheap. Chime disclosed in its prospectus that it spent $1.4 billion on marketing between 2022 and 2024. Britt said the retention rate is above 90% once users set up direct deposit.

“Sometimes for people, it takes a change in life — a change in their career, a job change — to be the point in time when they actually make the switch and use us as a primary bank account,” he said.

The company’s core revenue comes from interchange fees, the charges merchants pay when consumers swipe Chime-issued debit or credit cards. Britt said 72% of Chime’s revenue is payments driven, versus traditional banks that rely heavily on fees from overdrafts and minimum balances.

“It’s pretty simplistic,” said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Mizuho. “I’m actually surprised by how unsophisticated that business model is.”

Chime’s performance in the public markets may set the tone for what comes next. Several other fintech players, including Klarna, Gemini and Bullish, have already filed for IPOs publicly or confidentially.

“If it goes well — and you’ll know that in the next two to three months — I think you’ll see much more receptivity” from other companies in the pipeline, said David Golden, partner at Revolution Ventures and former head of tech investment banking at JPMorgan Chase.

“If it doesn’t go well,” Golden added, “I think they’ll continue just to sit on their hands and wait it out.”

Chime is a five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, having made the annual list from 2020-2024.

WATCH: What happens now that the IPO window is open