Meta licensed Midjourney's image and video technology
In August 2025 one of the largest AI spenders chose to rent a small company's models instead of relying only on its own.
Kivorent News desk, published , 1 min read
This is a look back at news from the week of . We wrote it on November 11, 2026, from the sources listed at the end.
Meta agreed to license image and video generation technology from Midjourney, a small independent AI company. Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, announced the deal on Threads in August 2025, TechCrunch reported, according to AI Weekly.
Why it mattered
Meta was spending tens of billions of dollars a year on AI and had its own image models. Licensing from a company with a fraction of its resources was an admission that Midjourney's results were better in ways users cared about.
It was also an early case of a pattern that grew through 2026: large companies paying for a startup's technology without buying the company. Nvidia's $6 billion deal with Poolside a year later followed the same model.
Sources
- Issue #452: The power shift inside OpenAI, AI Weekly, August 23, 2025
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