“A lot of compute is needed,” Mr. Musk said in a post about the financing, in
Elon Musk’s X Users Decline: Over 1,15,000 users in the US have deactivated their X account.
” Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion from investors, including US venture capitalists, NVIDIA, AMD, and investment funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This funding will be used to develop products for billions of users and advance research. xAI is now valued at $50 billion and competes with OpenAI.”
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk’s startup xAI announced that its latest funding round raised $6 billion from investors. The company is fighting stiff competition in the artificial intelligence market.
The firm, whose flagship product is the Grok chatbot, garnered support from US venture capitalists, chipmakers NVIDIA and AMD, and investment funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Musk has repeatedly warned that AI poses a risk to human civilisation but is pushing hard for a more significant sector investment share. xAI raised $6 billion in May.
The company is now one of the world’s most valuable startups, with an estimated valuation of $50 billion. However, it is still dwarfed by chief competitor OpenAI’s estimated valuation of $157 billion.
Despite the sky-high estimates, critics have pointed out that AI firms are burning through cash and still have no clear path to profitability.
xAI announced the funding on Monday. The company said it would use the cash injection to “ship groundbreaking products that billions of people will use.”
It would also “accelerate the research and development of future technologies, enabling the company’s mission to understand the true nature of the universe.”.
Musk, who also runs SpaceX and Tesla and is a chief backer of US President-elect Donald Trump, wrote on his X account that “a lot of computing is needed” to power AI products.
He launched the company in July 2023, shortly after signing an open letter calling for a pause in developing powerful AI models.
Musk is currently pursuing legal legal action against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which he co-founded as a non-profit in 2015 before leaving in 2018; he alleges that its conversion to a for-profit company violates generally binding commitments.
