xAI has successfully closed its Series C funding round, raising $6 billion with participation from investors such as A16Z, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Lightspeed, and Sequoia Capital, among others.
With this, the company is said to have raised a total of around $12 billion.
Strategic investments from NVIDIA and AMD were also secured, supporting xAI’s efforts to scale its infrastructure rapidly.
The funding will aid the expansion of xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, which currently operates with 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs.
The company plans to double this capacity to 200,000 GPUs using Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet platform.
The Elon Musk-led company said that funds raised in this financing round will be utilised to enhance our advanced infrastructure, deliver groundbreaking products that will impact billions of people, and expedite the research and development of future technologies, all in support of the company’s mission to understand the true nature of the universe.
xAI’s journey since inception
Since its inception in July 2023, xAI has quickly risen to a reported valuation of $50 billion, positioning itself as a notable competitor to OpenAI, which is valued at $157 billion.
The rapid growth of xAI has outpaced other AI startups, such as Anthropic, with a valuation of $19 billion, and Perplexity, valued at $2.8 billion.
Since the Series B funding in May 2024, xAI has made significant strides in several key areas.
It has built the world’s largest AI supercomputer, Colossus, in 122 days, and is on track to expand it to 200,000 GPUs.
In October, xAI launched an API enabling developers to integrate Grok into third-party apps and platforms.
This move further extends the reach of Grok’s capabilities, allowing external applications to leverage its advanced AI model for a variety of use cases.
Additionally, the Aurora image generation model enhances Grok’s multimodal understanding, editing, and generation capabilities.
Grok now also leverages the 𝕏 platform to provide real-time information, with new features like web search and citations.
Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI but left the company in 2018 after disagreements over its direction.
The billionaire launched his AI startup to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Grok’s expansion to iOS
The world’s richest person’s AI startup is developing an iOS app to expand access to its product, as seen in an app store listing.
The listing introduces Grok Beta for iOS, offering free access to xAI’s latest model, Grok 2. “Grok is an AI-powered assistant designed to be maximally truthful, useful, and curious. Get answers to any question, generate striking images, and upload pictures to gain a deeper understanding of your world. With Grok, the universe is in your hands!” the app description reads.
Grok is also available through the Musk-owned X social media platform, where it was recently made free to use.
The chatbot will also be accessible through Grok.com.
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