Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI announced on Monday it has secured $6 billion in Series C funding from major technology and financial institutions, marking its second major funding round this year.

What Happened: The investment includes strategic participation from NVIDIA Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., alongside financial giants BlackRock, Inc. and Morgan Stanley.

The funding will support xAI's ambitious expansion of its Colossus supercomputer, which currently operates with 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. The company plans to double this capacity to 200,000 GPUs using Nvidia's Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.

Since its founding in July 2023, xAI has rapidly grown to a reported valuation of $50 billion, positioning itself as a significant competitor to OpenAI, which is valued at $157 billion. The company's growth has outpaced other AI startups including Anthropic ($19 billion valuation) and Perplexity ($2.8 billion valuation).

Why It Matters: The funding announcement coincides with xAI's expansion of its chatbot Grok's availability. Previously exclusive to paying subscribers of X, formerly known as Twitter, Grok is now being tested as a standalone iOS app and will be accessible through Grok.com. The chatbot features real-time web access and generative AI capabilities, including text rewriting and image generation.

Additional investors in the round include Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital, and several sovereign wealth funds. According to an SEC filing, the minimum investment in this round was $77,593, with nearly 97 investors participating.

The funds will support xAI's continued development of advanced AI systems, including Grok 3, which is currently in training.