Billionaire Elon Musk raises an additional $6 billion for AI startup.

"It requires a lot of computing power," billionaire Elon Musk wrote on his personal X account on December 24, referring to xAI – the startup he founded last March.

On its website, xAI announced that it has just raised an additional $6 billion from major funds such as a16z, Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings, and others.

The startup says the money will be used to build infrastructure and accelerate research and development. The ultimate goal of xAI is to "understand the true nature of the universe."

Major chip manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD also participated in the new funding round as strategic investors and "continue to support xAI's rapid infrastructure expansion."

Elon Musk ( right ) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

According to the New York Times, this funding round raises xAI's valuation to $35-$40 billion, up from $24 billion earlier this year. The exact valuation of Musk's AI startup has not yet been disclosed.

Two months after its founding, xAI raised $6 billion, giving the company a valuation of $24 billion in its Series B funding round. In November of this year, the WSJ reported that Musk had raised an additional $5 billion, bringing the company's valuation to $50 billion. But with the recently released information, xAI has raised even more money in its latest funding round.

After leaving OpenAI and being repeatedly involved in legal controversies, Musk started his own AI startup, competing with major companies in the market, including OpenAI led by Sam Altman.

To keep up with market competitors, billionaire Musk quickly built the " world's largest supercomputer," Colossus. This colossal machine powers Grok, xAI's AI chatbot, which is being integrated into the X social network.

Colossus is powered by 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. xAI is planning to double the number of chips and release a second version of Grok.

In contrast to OpenAI's commercialization efforts, Musk stated that his newly founded startup would aim for non-profit status. The company plans to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) for app developers on the platform, including models for creating Aurora images for Grok and Grok on X.

The company also stated that it is training Grok 3 and focusing on groundbreaking products that leverage the power of Grok, Colossus, and X to change the way people live, work, and play.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/ti-phu-elon-musk-huy-dong-them-6-ti-usd-cho-startup-ai-185241226201431499.htm