Source: Finance Association
① As Musk accelerates his layout in the AI field, compounding his high influence, it is likely to bring more hype and popularity to the capital market; ② According to previous reports, xAI is close to launching a new round of financing with 24 billion US dollars.
Various indications suggest that as xAI, the artificial intelligence startup of the former world's richest man Elon Musk, nears its first anniversary, the company is speeding up the layout of the AI field, and its mapping of the capital market is constantly being strengthened.
According to the latest reports, XAI is not only competing with Musk's “old rival” Zuckerberg for opportunities to cooperate with the customized chatbot team Character.AI, but the company's news on computing power construction is also quite eye-catching.
“The enemy's path is narrow” with Zuckerberg
With Musk's acquisition of Twitter (now renamed X), he and Meta boss Zuckerberg became direct rivals. And social media platforms' unique demand for customized chat AI also enabled them to open the doors of the Silicon Valley startup Character.ai at the same time.
Character.ai is a company that specializes in developing an AI chatbot creation platform. It aims to create chatbots that simulate the language style of real people (such as Hwang In-hoon and Albert Einstein) or virtual characters (such as a character in the game “Genshin”).
It is worth emphasizing that Noam Shazeer, the founder of Character.ai, was one of the authors of the Google Transformer paper back then. After many years, this group of Google researchers, who pioneered today's new AI landscape, have embarked on the path of starting a business.
According to several people familiar with the matter, Meta and XAI both had early discussions with Character.ai, mainly involving research-level collaboration, such as model development and pre-training.
Meta previously stated that it is integrating AI character chatbots into its various platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which will also include robots that “act as celebrities.” At the same time, XAI has also developed the chatbot Grok for use by paid subscribers of the X platform.
For Musk and Zuckerberg, they also have an advantage that other tech giants don't have when it comes to developing AI for exclusive characters — they have lots of social media data in their hands.
Build a “computing power gigafactory”
To make a difference in the AI field, it is also inseparable from continuing to spend money to get computational power.
According to a report by the science and innovation media The Information on Saturday, during an investor presentation in May of this year, Musk stated that xAI plans to build a supercomputer with amazing specifications, bluntly stating that it will be a “computing power superfactory.”
Earlier this year, Musk revealed that training the Grok 2 model would require about 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, while training the next generation model and later would require 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips.
Quite in line with Musk's heroic style, he is preparing to combine all the chips into a “supercomputer.” He told investors that the project, if completed, would be at least four times the size of the largest GPU cluster in existence today. Musk also stated that he would personally step down, push the machine to work in the fall of 2025, and added that he may cooperate with Oracle to develop this huge computer.
Although Tesla itself is also developing Dojo supercomputers, the “computing power gigafactory” still has to line up to buy Nvidia chips. In Nvidia's Blackwell press release in March of this year, Musk publicly shouted that Nvidia's artificial intelligence hardware was “the best.”
It is worth mentioning that in the middle of this month, there was news that xAI was close to reaching a multi-year agreement with Oracle to supply cloud computing power worth “10 billion US dollars,” which once boosted Oracle's stock price. While continuously purchasing computing power and building its own “computing power gigafactory,” xAI's position to catch up with market leaders is already evident.
According to people familiar with the matter, xAI is financing with a valuation target of 24 billion US dollars and plans to raise more than 6 billion US dollars in the next few weeks. According to rough estimates, this amount of money is probably enough to buy 200,000 H100 chips.
From the perspective of a major AI company, $6 billion is probably only enough to burn 1-2 years of effort. Musk himself has admitted that to be competitive on the AI circuit at this stage, it will cost at least a few billion dollars a year.
Off-topic: AI bosses set up a “pan-AI circuit” early
As Nvidia handed over another financial report confirming the AI boom this week, the US stock market is also showing a new trend — in addition to speculating on chip stocks, capital has also begun operating sectors related to data center support, such as electricity, power plants, electrical equipment, and photovoltaics.
Naturally, Musk needless to say. Tesla has a mature energy storage business, and is also a supplier to many photovoltaic power plants and photovoltaic equipment manufacturers.
Oklo, a nuclear fission startup invested by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, also hit the US stock market in the middle of this month. The company's CEO, Jacob DeWitte, said in an interview this week that 80% of customers currently inquiring about electricity purchases are data center operators. He expects this situation to be just the “tip of the iceberg,” and there will be more demand for data centers in the future.
Oklo announced this week that it has signed a 100-megawatt data center campus power supply agreement. However, the company has yet to obtain permission to build a small nuclear power plant, and DeWitte also said that it is unlikely that there will be any power plants put into operation until 2027.
editor/tolk