Elon Musk's generative AI startup xAI has raised $6 billion in a Series C funding round.
Investors include A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital, amongst others. GPU companies NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices also participated in the round.
xAI supercomputer
The company last raised $6bn in May, and this summer launched its supercomputer in Memphis with up to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
CNBC last month reported on the possibility of this latest round, at the time saying the company was targeting a $50bn valuation. The new funds are expected to primarily be spent on acquiring another 100,000 Nvidia GPUs.
Earlier this month, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce claimed that Musk eventually planned to expand the Colossus supercomputer to some one million GPUs.
"The funds from this financing round will be used to further accelerate our advanced infrastructure, ship groundbreaking products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies enabling the company’s mission to understand the true nature of the universe," xAI said in its funding announcement.
The company pitches itself as an alternative to OpenAI, which Musk is currently suing for deviating from its non-profit roots. Before he broke away from OpenAI, Musk had pitched making the company a division of for-profit Tesla.
Musk has called OpenAI's ChatGPT too “woke” and “politically correct,” and claimed that xAI's Grok is “maximally truth-seeking."
The company was founded in March 2023 and has grown rapidly since, with its products integrated deeply into Musk's Twitter/X, and trained on the social media platform's user-generated data.
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