December 24, 2012 - The generative artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk xA Announced the completion of a $6 billion (currently about RMB 43.82 billion) Series C round.Financing. The round attracted participation from a number of leading investment organizations and technology giants, including A16Z, BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed Venture Partners, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital. Notably.GPU giants NVIDIA and AMD also participated in the round.
This is another large-scale funding round for xAI after it closed its last $6 billion funding round in May of this year. This summer, xAI launched its supercomputer with up to 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in Memphis. As CNBC reported last month, xAI's target valuation at the time was $50 billion, and the main use of the funding is expected to be to purchase an additional 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs to further expand its computing power. Earlier this month, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce revealed thatMusk eventually plans to scale the supercomputer, called Colossus, to about 1 million GPUs.
In its funding announcement, xAI said, "This round of funding will be used to further accelerate our advanced infrastructure, launch breakthrough products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the development of future technologies to fulfill the company's mission to understand the true nature of the universe."
xAI has been positioning itself as an alternative to OpenAI. Musk is currently suing OpenAI for allegedly deviating from its original non-profit mission. Musk has publicly criticized OpenAI's ChatGPT for being too "awakening" and "politically correct," and claims that xAI's Grok pursues "the greatest possible truth. xAI claims thatGrok 3, its most powerful model to date, is currently in training..
Founded in March 2023, xAI has grown rapidly since then, with its products deeply integrated into Musk's social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and utilizing the platform's user-generated data for training. The closing of this massive funding round will undoubtedly further boost xAI's growth in the AI space and intensify its competition with rivals like OpenAI.
