Elon Musk’s xAI Raises $6 Billion in Funds, Doubling Valuation
On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s AI company raised a whopping $6 billion for its Series C xAI fund, nearly doubling its valuation to $45 billion and attracting major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, Nvidia, AMD and Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holdings, according to the company.
The latest round of the xAI funding brought the company’s total to $12 billion. As per xAI’s statement, the xAI funding rounds will support infrastructure scaling, research and development (R&D) acceleration, and the launch of consumer and enterprise AI products.
xAI funding valuation
In May, Elon musk’s xAI announced $6 billion funding round after announcing “xAI’s most powerful model yet … is currently training and we are now focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products.”
xAI’s Perpetual Rise to Fame
Founded in 2023, xAI grew with its flagship AI model, Grok, now integral to X. Grok powers features like a chatbot for X Premium users and a news tool and integrates with xAI’s image generation system, Aurora, to create and analyze images, despite scrutinizing criticism over limited content moderation.
To keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic, xAI released an API in October 21 for developers and a standalone iOS app. It’s also training its next generation Grok models at the Memphis data center, which is prepared with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs which is a capacity that will double in the next year.
Similarly to most of Musk’s companies, xAI was not spared from its own set of hurdles as Elon musk reportedly wants to build a supercomputer with xAI while contending with lawsuits and competition from AI tech giants. Musk, a founding member of OpenAI, has criticized Altman’s company for lacking competitiveness and withholding resources.
Tech and Political Support to Musk
By now and following President-elect. Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it has become even more evident the level of Musk’s undeniable influence on the tech world or else where the xAI fund would be collected.
The influence has been shown in the xAI fund the company was able to secure, and it is true that Musk has the resources to integrate AI and spread it into different industries through his companies, such as AI integration into EV through Tesla, space exploration through SpaceX, among others.
Simultaneously, critics attribute a big part of his latest wave of successes to support from political figures, including the one and only, President Donald Trump.
While Elon musk’s xAI is expected to close funding round soon his vision continues to reshape technology, one wonders if his rise would have been as fast without these connections in the political world. And as xAI continues its path in the tech world, it seems clear that Musk’s abilities to revolutionize and his supporters will both be at the center in shaping the future not only of AI but of Musk’s standing in the tech world as well.
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