xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has now secured $6 billion in a successful Series C funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $12 billion. This fresh infusion comes just six months after it had secured $6 billion in Series B funding.
This latest round attracted a range of investors, including the likes of prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital, as well as investment giants such as BlackRock and Fidelity. The round also saw participation from major chip manufacturers, including NVIDIA and AMD. According to a statement by the firm, the proceeds from the latest funding round will be deployed towards boosting its infrastructure, rolling out more products, and towards research and development.
xAI is relatively late to the AI race, having fallen behind the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Apple. Still, the firm has made progress and rolled out its own ChatGPT alternative in the form of Grok (initially rolled out in November 2023). It is a chatbot that is integrated into Musk’s social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) and provides users with real-time information, alongside other features.
Initially limited to premium subscribers, Grok is now available to all users of X. Grok-2, a language model designed to perform higher-order reasoning tasks, was later rolled out in beta in August 2024, and aimed to offer improved responses in complex scenarios. Musk, in contrast to OpenAI and its ChatGPT, has positioned Grok as a more “rebellious” AI with a “sense of humor”, one that is less constrained by ethical or political limitations and can “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
In addition to this, xAI announced in its statement that it has also developed the Colossus supercomputer, a behemoth designed to process vast amounts of data and enhance the training of AI models. Powered by an impressive 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, Colossus is already planned for an expansion to 200,000 GPUs, something that could give xAI the edge it needs to push ahead of its competitors in the rapidly-expanding AI landscape. And earlier this month, xAI also made its foray into using generative AI to create images, as well as take input from existing images and edit them. The result was Aurora, which was initially rolled out to Grok users in a handful of countries (it was later rolled out to a wider user base).
