xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) company, has raised USD 6 billion in new capital, according to a regulatory filing. The equity financing came from 97 investors and includes stakes as small as USD 77,593, as stated in the filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. The filing did not disclose the identities of the investors. Furthermore, the company has not provided specific information regarding its valuation or revenue figures.
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xAI's Latest Funding
The funding comes as xAI seeks to bolster its presence in the AI industry by expanding its Memphis, Tennessee, supercomputer to accommodate at least one million graphics processing units (GPUs). Earlier reports indicate that existing investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Qatar Investment Authority, participated in the funding round.
Since its inception last year, xAI has launched its generative AI model, Grok, which powers features on X. The company reportedly plans to use funds from this round to purchase 100,000 AI chips from Nvidia.
Series B Funding
This new funding brings xAI's total capital raised to USD 12 billion, adding to the USD 6 billion tranche secured earlier in May. The company stated that the Series B funding will be used to bring its first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies.
"Our Series B funding round of USD 6 billion with participation from key investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others," the company announced in May.
"xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity. The company's mission is to understand the true nature of the universe," the company said in a blog post.
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The Grok AI Model
xAI's flagship product, a chatbot called Grok, is available to paying users of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. In August, the company released Grok-2, a frontier language model with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities. This release introduced two models: Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini.
In November, xAI launched the API Public Beta, offering programmatic access for developers to build applications using Grok foundation models via the newly released API.
--Update on December 7:
Grok AI Chatbot Now Accessible to All X Users
xAI has rolled out its AI chatbot, Grok, to all users on the social platform X (formerly Twitter), previously available only to Premium subscribers of X's higher-tier plans, X Premium and X Premium+. Free users can send up to 10 messages every two hours, after which they will be prompted to upgrade to a paid subscription. They can also analyse three images per day. As of this writing, Grok is providing access only to the AI assistant Grok-2, and the image generator Grok 2+ Aurora. There is also a fun mode which users can enable.
