Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has secured $6 billion in Series B funding, aiming to challenge OpenAI. Announced on May 26, this investment significantly boosts xAI’s valuation to $24 billion, up from $18 billion pre-funding.
“XAI is pleased to announce our Series B funding round of $6 billion,” the company said in a blog. The funds will be used to launch xAI’s initial products, enhance infrastructure, and speed up future technology development.
Investors in this round include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Valor Equity Partners, and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.
This is one of the largest so far in the industry. Microsoft has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI, while Amazon.com put about $4 billion into Anthropic.
Musk was an early supporter of OpenAI before it released ChatGPT in late 2022. He later withdrew his support and openly spoke about the dangers of AI.
Last year, he joined many industry leaders in calling for a pause in AI development. In November, Musk launched Grok, a competitor to ChatGPT, integrated into X.com (formerly Twitter).
Grok is a product of xAI, which is led by executives with backgrounds at Alphabet’s DeepMind, Microsoft, and Tesla.
xAI announced on Sunday that its primary focus is to develop “advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity.”
The company is working on a chatbot named Grok, which can access X (formerly Twitter) in real time. Earlier this month, Musk informed investors of his plan to build a supercomputer, referred to as the “gigafactory of compute,” to support xAI’s development.
This supercomputer is expected to be “at least four times the size of the biggest GPU clusters that exist today,” such as those used by Meta for training AI models, according to Musk.
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