Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has successfully raised $6 billion and reached a valuation of $18 billion to accelerate the challenge of OpenAI he once supported.
Musk announced this B-round of financing on May 26, less than a year after xAI's debut, marking a major investment in the development of artificial intelligence tools.
Currently, OpenAI's total funding amount to $14 billion. XAI's single financing scale reached nearly half of OpenAI's total financing amount in less than a year. It can be seen that investors are optimistic about Musk.
Key investors in this funding include US venture capital firm Valor Equity Partners, led by Antonio Gracias, the first investors in Tesla and SpaceX; Dubai's “mystery” investment company Vy Capital; Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; venture capital firm Sequoia Capital (Sequoia Capital); Fidelity Management & Research Company and Saudi Kingdom Holding, etc.
Among them, Vy Capital is an investment company headquartered in Dubai. The company is relatively low-key and is known as a “mystery” investment company. The company invests globally in technology, finance, and other businesses such as Counterpart, MobileCoin, X Corp. (formerly Twitter), etc.
Musk was an early supporter of artificial intelligence, and he supported OpenAI before it launched ChatGPT. But he later withdrew that support and advocated caution, arguing that the technology was potentially dangerous.
In November, he launched Grok, a product that competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The product was trained on X.com and integrated into X.com, a social network (the predecessor of Twitter). To date, this is the most compelling product in xAI's work.
In the latest report, Musk also revealed his plans for a “supercomputing power factory.” According to The Information, he plans to launch a supercomputer by fall 2025, and the connected chipset is expected to be 4 times the size of today's largest GPU cluster.
To train its next version of Grok, xAI expects to require up to 100,000 GPUs, and plans to serial these chips into a supercomputer, or Gigafactory of Compute (Gigafactory of Compute).
xAI said in its blog that it will use this funding to drive the first batch of products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the development of future technology.
Musk, Google, and Tesla veterans will officially announce the establishment of this artificial intelligence company in July.