Meta has struck a high-profile partnership with Midjourney — one of the fastest-growing startups in the AI image and video generation space, marking a step deeper into the artificial intelligence arms race.
The announcement, made Friday by Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on Threads, signals Meta’s willingness to collaborate rather than compete outright, even as it spends billions building its own AI infrastructure.
Wang explained that the partnership is part of a broader strategy to secure every possible advantage.
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“To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,” he wrote. “This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap, and working with the best players across the industry.”
The deal allows Meta to license Midjourney’s highly popular image and video generation technology, which has gained a cult following for producing artistic, realistic visuals. For Meta, it is a chance to rival models such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, and Black Forest Lab’s Flux — all of which are considered industry leaders in generative media. Meta itself has already experimented with tools like Imagine, an image-generation feature baked into Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, as well as Movie Gen, which allows users to create videos from text prompts. But licensing Midjourney’s models could supercharge those efforts.
This partnership adds to Meta’s growing list of aggressive AI moves in 2024. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized a massive hiring spree for AI talent, dangling compensation packages as high as $100 million to lure researchers from rivals. The company also poured $14 billion into Scale AI, a San Francisco-based data-labeling firm, and snapped up Play AI, a voice startup, to round out its AI portfolio.
Zuckerberg’s expansionist streak has extended even further. He has held talks with other AI labs about potential acquisitions. He was reportedly approached at one point by Elon Musk about joining his $97 billion takeover bid for OpenAI — a bid Musk ultimately failed to complete, and which OpenAI denied. Although Meta declined to join, the conversation underscored just how central AI has become to the future of the world’s largest tech companies.
While the financial terms of the Midjourney deal remain undisclosed, the startup is already a remarkable outlier in the AI space. Its CEO, David Holz, said in a post on X that Midjourney remains independent and has never taken on outside investment. That independence has made the company stand out in a market dominated by venture-backed AI labs burning through capital. At one point, Meta explored acquiring Midjourney outright, according to Upstarts Media, but Holz has so far resisted selling.
Founded in 2022, Midjourney quickly became a revenue powerhouse, reportedly on track to generate $200 million by 2023 from subscriptions that start at $10 per month and go as high as $120 for premium access. In June, the company released its first video-generation model, V1, signaling its ambitions beyond still imagery.
But in June, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, alleging that its models were trained on copyrighted material — a legal battle that mirrors broader disputes facing nearly every leading AI company, including Meta. So far, courts have largely sided with tech firms, ruling that training on publicly available data falls under fair use, but the litigation remains a dark cloud over the industry.
The stakes are financial as much as technological for Meta. Its $14 billion bet on AI and the billions more it is spending on infrastructure and talent underscore a gamble that generative media will be a central part of its future products. Analysts say the Midjourney licensing deal will save Meta both time and resources in building image models from scratch, while providing a bridge to compete with OpenAI, Google, and others.
The deal also points to a broader trend: partnership is becoming as important as algorithms in the AI race. Meta announced a hiring freeze earlier this week, suggesting that its partnership with Midjourney is not just about artful images — it’s about shoring up its position in a rapidly consolidating industry. Meta platforms reportedly struck a six-year cloud computing deal with Google worth more than $10 billion