By Deborah Mary Sophia

Jan 15 (Reuters) - Wikipedia on Thursday unveiled partnerships with several Big Tech companies including Microsoft MSFT.O, Meta META.O and Amazon AMZN.O, marking a major step up in the non-profit's ability to monetize tech firms' reliance on its content.

Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the online encyclopedia, said it also signed on AI startup Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, among other firms, over the past year, having enlisted Meta and Amazon as partners previously.

It already has an arrangement with Alphabet's Google GOOGL.O, which was announced in 2022.

Wikipedia content is crucial to training AI models — its 65 million articles across over 300 languages are a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors.

However, companies scraping high volumes of freely available Wikipedia knowledge for AI training has driven up server demand and, subsequently, costs at the non-profit, whose primary source of income is small donations from the public.

Wikimedia has been pushing for greater adoption of its enterprise product, which allows tech companies to pay for training access to its content while receiving data in ways that cater to their large-scale training needs.

"Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview.

"It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform ... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work."

Wikipedia's content is created and maintained by about 250,000 volunteer editors globally, who write, edit and fact-check the information.

"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," said Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Tim Frank.

Wikimedia named former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan its new chief executive, effective on January 20, Reuters first reported last month.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)

((DeborahMary.Sophia@thomsonreuters.com))