By Bukola Oyeyemi
Publication Date: 2026-01-16 23:01:00
Wikipedia officially celebrated its 25th anniversary on January 15, 2026. To mark a quarter-century of free, human-curated knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a significant expansion of its commercial arm, Wikimedia Enterprise, revealing that several new tech giants have signed up as paying partners.
The new roster includes Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity, who join existing (and newly confirmed) partners like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Ecosia. These companies are now paying for “premium” access to Wikipedia’s data to power their AI chatbots, search engines, and voice assistants at a scale and speed that traditional web scraping cannot provide.
1. Why Big Tech is Paying for Wikipedia
While Wikipedia remains free for the public to read, the surge in generative AI has put immense pressure on Wikimedia’s infrastructure. AI models rely heavily on Wikipedia as a “core dataset” for training because it is one of the few vast, human-verified, and well-structured sources of truth on the internet.
By joining Wikimedia Enterprise, these companies get:
• High-Throughput APIs: Access to data at the “volume and speed” required for large-scale AI operations.
• Structured Data: Clean, machine-readable formats that make it easier for LLMs (Large Language Models) to ingest information without “hallucinating.”
• Real-Time Streams: The ability to see edits as they happen, ensuring AI responses stay up to date with breaking…
