12月初，根据一份监管文件，马斯克人工智能初创公司xAI筹集到了60亿美元的新资本。① It is said that xAI's valuation has exceeded $40 billion, with a target valuation of $50 billion, which is double the valuation from six months ago; ② Only investors who supported prior financing rounds of xAI are allowed to participate in the Series C financing; ③ This financing will be used to further accelerate their infrastructure and launch groundbreaking products that will be used by billions of people.
According to the Star Daily on December 24 (Editor: Song Ziqiao), Musk's large model platform xAI has recently completed $6 billion in Series C financing, and the latest investment lineup has been unveiled—With participation from NVIDIA, AMD, Morgan Stanley among others, 97 individuals or institutions in total.
Participants specifically include A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed Capital, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, Qatar Investment Authority, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, NVIDIA, AMD, etc. (Note from Xiao K: NVIDIA and AMD are participating as 'strategic investors').
At the beginning of December, according to a regulatory document, Musk's AI startup xAI raised $6 billion in new capital. It is said that xAI's valuation has now exceeded $40 billion in this round of financing. At that time, xAI did not list the names of investors or provide any valuation data.
Adding the $6 billion from xAI's financing in May this year (invested by Sequoia Capital, Kingdom Holdings, Saudi Prince Bin Talal, etc.), xAI's total financing amount has exceeded $12 billion. According to CNBC, xAI's target valuation is $50 billion, which is double the valuation from six months ago.
The Financial Times reported that only investors who supported prior financing rounds of xAI are allowed to participate in Series C financing. It is said that investors who helped fund Musk's acquisition of Twitter received a maximum of 25% of xAI's shares.
Additionally, it was reported that xAI has informed investors of plans to conduct another round of financing next year.
Where will the Series C financing be directed?
According to its official website, xAI's most powerful model, Grok 3, is currently in training, now focusing on launching innovative new products for Consumers and businesses. This financing will be used to further accelerate their infrastructure, launch groundbreaking products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the R&D of future technologies to fulfill the company's mission to understand the true nature of the universe.
Infrastructure investment may refer to its Grok model and a multi-billion-dollar supercomputer site located in Memphis, Tennessee, used for training its AI models.
Currently, the large model launched by xAI is Grok 2, which has advanced reasoning capabilities and overall performance surpassing GPT-4o. Subsequently, xAI opened the model's API to provide tailored services for developers.
Grok 3 is considered a competitor to OpenAI's latest flagship model, o3. According to previous leaks, this model is expected to be released by the end of this year.
Announced in July 2023, xAI has been established for less than two years. Since completing a Series B financing round in May, xAI has made significant technological progress and successfully built the world's largest AI supercomputer—Colossus. This supercomputer uses NVIDIA's full-stack reference design and is equipped with up to 0.1 million NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, which will soon be expanded to 0.2 million GPUs. Colossus was fully operational within 122 days and began running workloads just 19 days after the first batch of servers was delivered.
In addition, xAI has launched a proprietary autoregressive image generation model, Aurora, primarily used to enhance Grok's multimodal understanding, editing, and generation capabilities.