SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 16, 2026, 02:19 PST
- Wikipedia’s operator has signed paid “enterprise” access deals with Microsoft, Meta and other AI firms.
- Wikimedia is trying to offset rising server costs linked to heavy automated scraping for AI training.
- The nonprofit did not disclose financial terms.
Wikipedia’s owner has signed paid content-access partnerships with Microsoft, Meta and other tech firms, aiming to turn the online encyclopedia’s role in training AI systems into a steadier revenue stream. (Reuters)
The move matters because the same AI boom that leans on Wikipedia’s articles has also pushed up the nonprofit’s infrastructure bill, as automated bots pull large volumes of data to train so-called large language models — systems that learn patterns from text and then generate new text on demand.
It also lands as publishers and platforms try to set new rules for the web’s training data, with AI companies facing a mix of licensing talks, lawsuits and rising pressure to pay for what they use. (AP News)
Wikimedia said the deals were struck through Wikimedia Enterprise, a paid service that provides structured content and tools for businesses through an API — a software pipe that lets companies fetch data in bulk without hammering the public site.
Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters the pitch to large tech firms was basic: Wikipedia is “a critical component” of their products, and the companies need to support it financially. Microsoft corporate vice president Tim Frank said the company viewed the tie-up as part of building a “sustainable content ecosystem” for the “AI internet.” (Reuters)
Wikimedia said Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity and Mistral AI were among the partners it has signed, as it marked Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary. (Wikimedia Foundation)
The nonprofit said earlier that Wikipedia’s content is crucial to training AI models, but scraping has pushed up server demand and costs. Wikipedia’s articles are written and maintained by about 250,000 volunteer editors, and donations remain the core funding source, it has said.
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, has argued the cost burden is getting harder to ignore. “The AI bots that are crawling Wikipedia are going across the entirety of the site,” he said at a Reuters event in December, describing the need for more servers and memory. (Reuters)
Wales has also warned that donations are not meant to underwrite commercial AI products, while Wikimedia has weighed technical measures to limit or shape bot access, even as it tries to preserve open access, Reuters reported.
There are risks. Wikimedia has not said how much the new partnerships will bring in, and it is unclear whether paid channels will reduce the volume of unlicensed scraping or simply sit alongside it. Even small shifts in how AI search tools summarize information — and how often they send users to source sites — could squeeze the wider ecosystem that Wikipedia depends on.
Wikimedia has said it plans to keep the encyclopedia free for individuals, while steering high-volume commercial users toward paid access that is designed for scale. The question now is whether that becomes a durable template for other open-knowledge projects — or just another stopgap as the AI training race keeps pulling harder on the pipes.
