After failing to convince OpenAI executives of his plans, Elon Musk started his own AI startup, xAI. Over the past several months, xAI has aggressively pursued funding to support its rapid growth and ambitious goals in the competitive AI landscape. In May, xAI announced its Series B funding round of $6 billion.
Last night, xAI announced that it had closed its Series C funding round of $6 billion. Popular VC firms including A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital participated in this funding round. xAI also announced that NVIDIA and AMD participated in the round as strategic investors that will help them rapidly scale their AI infrastructure.
As expected, xAI will use the funds to further improve its computing infrastructure, develop products, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies. xAI is also hiring aggressively to pursue its mission.
Since its Series B funding announcement in May of this year, xAI has made the following progress:
Colossus, xAI has established a decisive hardware advantage with the world’s largest AI supercomputer using an NVIDIA full stack reference design with 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Compared to typical multi-year industry timeframes, Colossus was fully operational in 122 days and started running workloads just 19 days after the first servers were delivered. Soon, xAI will double the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, achieved by using the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.Grok 2, a frontier language model with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilitiesxAI API, gives developers programmatic access to our foundation models and is built on a new bespoke tech stack that allows multi-region inference deployments for low-latency access across the world.
Aurora, xAI’s proprietary autoregressive image generation model for Grok enhances multimodal understanding, editing, and generation capabilitiesGrok on 𝕏, leveraging the 𝕏 platform to understand what’s happening in the world in real time. We recently added new features enhancing the 𝕏 experience like web search, citations, and our recent image generator, Aurora.
With this substantial investment, xAI is well-positioned to compete with other major players including OpenAI, Google and Meta in the AI landscape. It will be interesting to see how they utilize these funds to innovate and advance their technology in the coming months.
