Elon Musk founded xAI last summer, and today it announced that it has raised $6 billion in funding, which it says will help bring the startup's "first products to market, establish advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the development of future technologies".
So far, xAI has launched Grok, a version that is claimed to be more advanced than OpenAI's ChatGPT and can be accessed through X. Currently, this chatbot is only available to X Premium subscribers.
According to xAI, this round of financing comes from multiple sources, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Last year, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed that xAI was seeking to raise up to $1 billion in equity investments, while a few months ago, the Financial Times reported that the company was seeking to raise up to... $6 billion. At the time, Musk denied the report.
The hardware to support AI development is quite expensive, with Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell B200 AI graphics card priced between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit. Last week, a report from Information stated that xAI needs 100,000 of Nvidia's current H100 chips to build a supercomputer to support an upgraded version of the Grok AI chatbot. It is reported that Musk told investors that the new data center is planned to launch in the fall of 2025.
Continuing to lead in the race for chips, talent, and technology in the AI field is not cheap - large tech companies have already invested billions of dollars in AI startups like Anthropic, and companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are also investing resources in their own AI projects.
Microsoft has also entered into a multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI, and it is reported that OpenAI is seeking hundreds of billions of dollars to reshape the global chip industry. Musk is suing OpenAI, claiming that the company has abandoned its mission to benefit humanity.
In addition to xAI and OpenAI, Musk said that unless he gains more control, he is "more inclined to develop products outside of Tesla" in the field of AI and robotics. Tesla shareholders will begin voting this week to decide whether to reinstate Musk's $56 billion compensation plan before the annual shareholder meeting on June 13.
