META'S $14.3B BET ON DATA: WHY THE AI RACE JUST TILTED TOWARD INFRASTRUCTURE

Welcome to Lore Brief, your weekly edge in the age of AI.

This issue is brought to you by Factory, Supermemory, and Micro.

Inside: Factory.ai, the Devin Killer

Factory is the Sequoia-backed startup going beyond flaky vibe-coded demos to production-grade agents your team can actually trust. Watch this video we did 2 weeks ago with the founder, Matan Grinberg. It’s already hit 47k views, our biggest episode ever!

Early users are seeing real results:

• 2× faster feature delivery

• 60% fewer context switches

• Enterprise-grade security with SOC 2 compliance

I’ve been using Factory for the last month, and it’s impressive. I personally think it’s better than Devin and Replit. I believe this is the next $100B AI startup.

Check out our recent podcast episode to learn more about Factory’s vision.

→ [Book a live demo] | Follow Factory on X

Sponsors

META'S $14.3B BET ON DATA: WHY THE AI RACE JUST TILTED TOWARD INFRASTRUCTURE

What happened Meta finalized a $14.3 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI, the data-curation company behind training pipelines for OpenAI, Anthropic, the US Department of Defense, and dozens of Fortune 500s. Scale founder Alexandr Wang will move to Menlo Park to lead a new "super-intelligence" group inside Meta, while Jason Droege (ex-Uber Eats) becomes interim CEO.

Why Meta did it

• Data moat: Exclusive, expertly labeled data that rivals cannot easily replicate

• Talent: A founder-level operator with deep government ties joins Meta leadership

• Regulatory posture: Positions Meta as a national-champion supplier of secure American AI

• Catch-up play: Meta's Llama models lag significantly behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI, forcing expensive moves to close the gap

What this means for the AI landscape

1. Data has become scarcer than GPUs. Companies are now paying premium prices for high-quality training datasets.

2. Power is becoming the choke point. Frontier-model training now requires gigawatts of capacity; energy infrastructure will determine winners.

3. Infrastructure is the largest untapped margin layer. Expect consolidation across data, compute, and power suppliers.

The bottom line This isn't just another tech acquisition. It's the second-largest private funding deal in history, and it signals that AI's next phase will be won by whoever controls the infrastructure stack.

Yes, this screams that Meta is behind in the model race. But while everyone chased the latest model releases, Meta just cornered the market on the data that makes those models possible.

The companies that survive the next 18 months won't just have the best algorithms. They’ll have access to the best AI infra.

People to Follow in AI

I created a thread on X this week highlighting AI entrepreneurs, indie hackers, and influencers worth following. It went viral. 3.1k bookmarks and over 25,000 new follows for the people featured. The response was overwhelming, with many saying it helped them discover voices they'd never heard of.

This got me thinking about expanding the type of content I create for Lore.com. If you have a moment, please complete the poll below to let me know what you'd find most valuable.

Things I’m Learning From

• [Link] – Text-to-LoRA: Instant Transformer Adaption

• [Link] – The Industry Reacts to o3-Pro! (It Thinks a LOT)

• [Link] – How AI is going to invent the next best AI | Demis Hassabis (CEO Google Deep Mind)

That’s it for today.

Consider forwarding Lore Brief to a colleague to help them get ahead in the AI Age.

-Nathan Lands
Connect → X | LinkedIn
Listen to The Next Wave → Apple | Spotify | YouTube

(Disclosure: I may own equity in companies mentioned in Lore Brief.)