The reports were right: Elon Musk‘s artificial intelligence startup xAI has raised $6 billion from a number of big shot Silicon Valley funds and a Saudi Arabian prince.
The company announced the news over the weekend, with Elon Musk confirming that the pre-money valuation for the company was $18 billion.
Key investors in this funding round include Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, but also Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and the country’s Kingdom Holding fund.
So far, xAI’s only publicly available product has been Grok, an AI chatbot positioned as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Grok, touted by Musk as an edgier but also more open chatbot, has recently caught the wrong type of actual news headlines when it generated some fake news headlines.
The proceeds from the funding round will be used to “take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.” Elon Musk also added that “there will be more to announce in the coming weeks.”
More broadly, xAI says it’s still “primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity,” with the company’s mission being “to understand the true nature of the universe.”
Besides that whole universe thing, there’s also the question of xAI’s relation to X (formerly known as Twitter), which owns a stake in xAI and integrated Grok as an add-on for subscribers only. The big money raise likely means X, which hasn’t been doing all too well financially, will start looking a little better as well.
A recent report also said that xAI needs money to build a supercomputer that would power Grok, with Musk planning to build the largest Nvidia GPU cluster around (of course he is) to do so.
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