Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang told employees in a memo on Thursday that he’s leaving for Meta, confirming reports from earlier in the week about his departure and a large investment from the social networking company.

Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.

“As you’ve probably gathered from recent news, opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in the memo that he shared on X. “In this instance, that cost is my departure. It has been the absolute greatest pleasure of my life to serve as your CEO.”

Scale AI is promoting Jason Droege, the chief strategy officer, to the CEO role. Droege was previously a venture partner at Benchmark and an Uber vice president.  

A small number of Scale AI employees will also join Meta as part of the agreement, Wang wrote.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company has finalized its “strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI.

“As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” the spokesperson said. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”

Meta’s big bet on Wang fits into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to bolster his company’s AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google-parent Alphabet. Zuckerberg has made AI his company’s top priority for 2025, but has grown increasingly frustrated with his team, particularly as Meta’s latest version of its flagship Llama AI models received a tepid response from developers, CNBC reported earlier this week.

Although Zuckerberg has traditionally placed long-standing employees into high-ranking position, he decided that the outsider Wang would be better suited to oversee AI initiatives deemed crucial for the company.

Scale AI counts a number of Meta rivals as customers, including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Meta is one of Scale AI’s biggest clients.

The Scale AI spokesperson said that Meta’s investment and hiring of Wang will not impact the startup’s customers, and that Meta will not be privy to any of its business information or data.

WATCH: Meta’s one of AI’s leaders, not a laggard.

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