Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI revealed it has raised $6 billion in its latest funding round as the startup continues to ramp up its battle against bitter rival OpenAI.
Musk took a victory lap after announcing Monday on his social media platform X that the company had completed its Series C round of funding — which is typically the final stage of venture capital funding.
“We’re going to need a bigger computer!” Musk wrote, in an apparent reference to the famous line from “Jaws.”
The need for “larger computing” is likely an indication that Musk plans to use the investment to build larger processing centers to house the supercomputers that will be needed to train and run more sophisticated AI models.
The company had raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round in May at a post-money valuation of $24 billion. In late November, xAI raised another $5 billion at a $50 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now, it appears that xAI has raised a larger round of $6 billion, but Musk did not disclose the valuation.
Investors in the latest funding round included Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings of Saudi Arabia, the sovereign wealth funds of Oman and Qatar, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, Dubai-based Vy Capital and MGX with based in the United Arab Emirates. the company said.
In its latest announcement, xAI said it is training Grok 3, the latest version of its chatbot, which was originally scheduled to be available by the end of this year.
The cash infusion comes as Musk is engaged in an AI arms race against ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the company he co-founded and which is now run by Sam Altman.
Musk, who left OpenAI after losing a power struggle against Altman and other co-founders, is suing the company and its main financial backer Microsoft.
It alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI, which in October was valued at about $157 billion, illegally sought to monopolize the market for generative artificial intelligence and sidelined competitors.
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