It is worth noting that the online encyclopedia is a non-profit making organization that has been able to secure very lucrative deals with the major technology conglomerates.
The organization that is famously known as the most popular international encyclopedia has joined the AI gold rush securing valuable information material at Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, which further increases its financial status amid the growing server traffic needs.
Tech Titans Join the Party
The Wikimedia Foundation signed formal contracts with Microsoft (MSFT.O) as well as Meta (META.O), Amazon (AMZN.O), Perplexity, and Mistral AI on 15 January 2026 as a follow-up to a previous collaboration with Google, which had begun in 2022.
With these collaborations, the parties have access now to Wikimedia Enterprise, a subscription based service providing the extensive corpus of the encyclopedia in bulk-friendly formats to be used in training large scale artificial intelligence applications.
This advancement bypasses the former free scraping methodology which increased costs because the AI companies were historically scraping data at an unreasonable pace. Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview.
Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies’ work that they need to figure out how to support financially
Power of the People
Without volunteer contributors, this effort could not be possible: the number of editors (around 260,000 of them worldwide) reviewing and editing new materials daily is in the thousands.
The encyclopedia has over 342 languages; it holds over 65 million articles with the English version alone having more than 7.1 million entries as of mid-January 2026 and the average article length is 2,800 words.
The site records about eighteen billion pageviews monthly, which makes it the number one choice of dependable training contents in artificial intelligence.
Money Talks
Wikimedia Enterprise’s total revenue in fiscal year (FY) 2024-2025 was $8.3 million, up 148% from the $3.4 million reported in FY 2023-2024.
This accounts for 4.0% of the Wikimedia Foundation’s total revenue over the period. This revenue is also shown in the 2024-25 Wikimedia Foundation audit report. Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President Tim Frank said.
Access to high‑quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft. (With Wikimedia), we’re helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued.
Bold Path Ahead
Such deals can be viewed as a watershed point, showing how non-profit organizations can commercially exploit open data without abusing it. As AI-driven scraping costs are mitigated, and revenue streams are established firmly.
The project’s objectives and key results for the fiscal year 2025–26 include growing revenue by no less than 10% year over year (with special emphasis on AI, which heavily relies on Wikimedia content); supporting the “responsible infrastructure strategy”.
Analysts forecast further migrations of artificial-intelligence firms to the model thus securing that machine-learning era holds knowledge created by volunteers and fair remuneration to contributors of the knowledge labor.
