Three months after the Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek upended the tech world with a model that rivaled America’s best, a 28-year-old AI executive named Alexandr Wang came to Capitol Hill to tell policymakers what they needed to do to maintain US dominance.
The US, Wang said at the April hearing, needs to establish a “national AI data reserve,” supply enough power for data centers and avoid an onerous patchwork of state-level rules. Lawmakers welcomed his feedback. “It’s good to see you again here in Washington,” Republican Representative Neal Dunn of Florida said. “You’re becoming a regular up here.”
Wang, the chief executive officer of Scale AI, may not be a household name in the same way OpenAI’s Sam Altman has become. But he and his company have gained significant influence in tech and policy circles in recent years.
Now, the startup’s stature is set to grow even more. Meta is in talks to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale, Bloomberg News reported over the weekend.
The financing may exceed $10 billion in value, making it one of the largest private company funding events of all time. The startup was valued at about $14 billion in 2024, as part of a funding round that included backing from Meta.
