xAI, an artificial intelligence company, has completed a Series C funding round and raised $6 billion in investment. What will the funds be used for?
xAI, an artificial intelligence company, has completed a Series C funding round and raised $6 billion in investment. What will the funds be used for?
As Business Insider reports, Elon Musk’s startup plans to use the funds to launch new products and build out its infrastructure. The company noted that among the participants were a16z, Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holdings, sovereign wealth funds of Oman and Qatar, California’s Lightspeed Venture Partners, Chicago’s Valor Equity Partners, Dubai’s Vy Capital and UAE technology investor MGX.
xAI added that chipmakers Nvidia and AMD have joined as strategic investors and «continue to support xAI in rapidly scaling our infrastructure.»
«We’re going to need a bigger computer!» Elon Musk commented on the funding on his Twitter account X. He attached an image generated by the Grok chatbot (xAI product) based on the movie Jaws to his post.
He was likely referring to the vast amount of computing power required to train and run AI models, which has driven huge demand for microchips and contributed to an approximately eightfold increase in Nvidia shares since the beginning of 2023.
Founded in March of last year, xAI raised $6 billion at a $24 billion valuation in a Series B round in May. In late November, it was reported that the company had raised another $5 billion at a $50 billion valuation. It appears that xAI ultimately raised a larger sum of $6 billion, but the valuation is not disclosed.
Earlier, the AI chatbot Grok, which is available on Elon Musk’s social network X (Twitter), received an update that adds the ability to create images from text prompts. As in previous versions, it seems that it again has few restrictions on generating controversial images.
