Mercor's ~2,000x run-rate ramp leads AI training-data growth, while Mechanical Turk's shutdown marks the sharpest exchange contraction

Asked:

“which vendors and exchanges of ai training data are growing or shrinking the fastest over the last 3 years”

A best-evidence market screen of 45 candidate rows covering AI training-data vendors and exchanges over the three-year window ending 2026-09-24 — not exhaustive market coverage, since most leading firms are private and disclose inconsistent metrics. Figures mix audited revenue, ARR/run-rate, marketplace adoption, web traffic and closure events; the visual keeps those bases apart and never puts unlike metrics on one axis. The headline chart shows the 14 defensible entities; all 45 screened rows are in the table and appendix.

Four-quadrant screen: growers and shrinkers, vendors and exchanges

Bar length = change multiple on a log scale, computed only where a numeric start and end share the same metric basis. Green = growing, red = shrinking; a grey status block marks a closure or retirement, where no numeric rate exists. Metric bases differ between panels (revenue vs run-rate vs adoption vs traffic) — compare within a panel, not across. Hover or tap a bar for the reported values, period and source.

Mercor is the most extreme reported vendor ramp: ~$1M to a $500M annualized run-rate in ~17 months, then above $2B by July 2026 — a private-company run-rate from secondary sources, not audited revenue.laptopandcoffee.com
Appen Global is the clearest disclosed vendor contraction: division revenue fell from $162M (FY24) to $127.9M (FY25), down 21%, per company reporting.earningsreport.io
Snowflake Marketplace partners booked over $100M gross in H1 2026, up 277% year over year across 1,700+ transactions; Databricks Marketplace grew listings and providers 300% from its June 2023 launch to 2,500+ listings by Nov 2024.snowflake.com databricks.com
Amazon Mechanical Turk closes permanently on 2026-09-30 after 21 years, with new customer access already stopped; data.world's Open Data Community was retired in July 2026 as the company refocused on enterprise catalog and governance.yuwish.kr wiki.archiveteam.org

Evidence table: all 45 screened rows

Click a header to sort. Confidence is a screen of source quality: disclosed filings and first-party posts rate higher than secondary research templates. Rows outside the headline chart include misclassified entities and weakly supported claims — e.g. the “Invisible Technologies shrinking” row covers only a generic transcription sub-segment while the company overall grew, and Scale AI's alleged $870M→$850M dip conflicts with growth estimates from stronger sources.

TypeEntityDirectionMetric basisStart → endPeriodMultipleConfidenceSource

Method: screen of 45 candidate rows on AI training-data vendors and exchanges gathered from independent web sources for the three-year window ending 2026-09-24; retrieved Sep 2026. Values are as reported — a mix of audited/reported annual revenue, ARR/run-rate, marketplace adoption counts, web-traffic estimates and closure announcements; multiples are computed only where start and end share a metric basis. Scale AI's $250M start (2022) predates the strict window and is shown as three-fiscal-year context. Only the 14 defensible entities appear in the headline chart; the remaining rows, including misclassified or weakly sourced claims, appear in the table only. Stated-change text truncated for space.

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