Source: Zhithon Finance

According to regulatory documents, Elon Musk's AI company xAI has raised 6 billion dollars. This financing round had 97 investors participating, with a minimum investment amount of 77,593 dollars, but the documents did not disclose the specific identities of the investors. xAI recently announced that investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, and Sequoia Capital, $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ and $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ and other companies.

AI venture capital is booming.

This financing round brought xAI's total funding to 12 billion dollars. Media reports in November mentioned that xAI's valuation target is 50 billion dollars, double what it was six months ago.

According to reports, only investors who supported xAI in the previous round of financing are allowed to participate in this round of financing. It is reported that investors who funded Musk's acquisition of Twitter can receive up to 25% of xAI shares.

It is reported that xAI has informed investors of plans to raise more funds next year.

This is not the only AI laboratory raising huge amounts of funding. Anthropic recently raised $4 billion, making its total funding reach $13.7 billion.$Amazon (AMZN.US)$OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October, bringing its total funding to $17.9 billion.

According to PitchBook, major trades such as OpenAI and Anthropic have driven AI venture capital activity to $31.1 billion in the third quarter of 2024, with over 2,000 transactions.

Musk's AI ambitions.

Musk founded xAI last year. Shortly after, the company launched its flagship generative AI model Grok, which currently supports many features on X, including a chatbot available to X Premium subscribers and some free users in certain regions.

Elon Musk once mocked ChatGPT and other AI systems for being too "woke" and "politically correct," despite Grok also avoiding political topics. He also referred to Grok as "maximizing the pursuit of truth," claiming it is less biased than other competing models, although there is evidence that Grok tends to lean left.

xAI is rapidly catching up to powerful competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The company launched an API in October, allowing customers to integrate Grok into third-party applications, platforms, and services. It has just released a standalone Grok iOS app to testing users.

Musk often states that X's data gives xAI an advantage over its competitors. Last month, X changed its privacy policy to allow third parties, including xAI, to use posts from X to train models.

It is worth noting that Musk is one of the founders of OpenAI but left the company in 2018 due to differences in direction. Musk claimed in the lawsuit against OpenAI that the organization benefitted from his early contributions while violating its commitment to its non-profit nature of making AI research accessible to everyone equally.

xAI also outlined its vision, according to which its models will be trained using data from Musk's various companies (including$Tesla (TSLA.US)$and SpaceX) and then its models can improve the technologies of these companies.

However, Tesla shareholders oppose these plans. Some individuals have sued Musk over his decision to establish xAI, claiming that he is diverting talent and resources from Tesla to a company that is essentially a competitor.

Nonetheless, these Trades have boosted xAI's revenue to approximately 0.1 billion dollars per year. In comparison, it is reported that Anthropic's revenue is expected to reach 1 billion dollars this year, while OpenAI aims to achieve 4 billion dollars by the end of 2024.

编辑/jayden