The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia, announced new and expanded paid partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI. These companies will now formally pay for structured, high-volume access to Wikipedia's content to train their artificial intelligence models. The move is designed to create a sustainable revenue stream for the foundation beyond its traditional reliance on small donations.
The agreements are facilitated through Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product launched in 2021 that provides a dedicated API for large-scale data users. This formalizes the relationship with Big Tech, moving them from scraping data for free—a practice that increased server costs for the foundation—to a paid, commercial service that ensures more stable and reliable access to Wikipedia's 65 million articles. Google has had a similar arrangement since 2022.