On Monday, December 23, Elon Musk’s company xAI announced that it had raised $6 billion in a Series C funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to more than $40 billion, while it continues to strengthen its AI products and infrastructure.
Article by Antonio Pequeño IV for Forbes US
What to remember
xAI closed the funding round at $6 billion and said the funds would be allocated to products and infrastructure, likely referring to its Grok AI model and the multibillion-dollar supercomputer site located at Memphis, Tennessee used to train its AI models.
Investors include Blackrock, A16Z, Saudi conglomerate Kingdom Holding, Fidelity and Sequoia Capital, the latter three of which participated in xAI’s $6 billion Series B funding round in May.
This latest funding round puts xAI valued at over $40 billion at least, with many reports putting the valuation of Elon Musk’s company at between $40 billion and $50 billion.
In its funding announcement, xAI said it was training Grok 3, which is not yet available and was scheduled for release at the end of the year, according to a tweet from Elon Musk in June.
The figure to remember: $12 billion
That’s the amount xAI raised this year in its Series B and Series C rounds, which included investors including Morgan Stanley, Kingdom Holding, Andreessen Horowitz, chip designer Nvidia and the company of AMD semiconductors.
Context
xAI has dedicated the year 2024 to building its AI language models and the supercomputer used to train them. The computer, dubbed “Colossus,” features 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units used for training the AI and will eventually be doubled in size, allowing it to take on a significantly high training workload. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, a competitor to xAI, welcomed the short time it took to get the supercomputer up and running and said at the DealBook Summit of New York Times that he thought Elon Musk’s company would become “a really serious competitor” (OpenAI currently exceeds xAI’s valuation with a massive valuation of $157 billion). Grok 2, xAI’s AI model, is available to users of According to the chatbot, Grok 3 will have greater computing power and improved responsiveness compared to its predecessor.
A translation by Flora Lucas
Also read: Elon Musk presented xAI as the antithesis of OpenAI during a recruiting event
