xAI, a company founded by Elon Musi in 2023 to advance scientific discovery, announced it raised $6 billion in a new round of funding. This round included participation from A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital, and others. And strategic investors NVIDIA and AMD also participated and continue to support xAI in rapidly scaling our infrastructure.
Since the announcement of the Series B funding round in May 2024, xAI has made significant progress and shipped a multitude of key initiatives, including:
1.) Colossus – xAI has established a decisive hardware advantage with the world’s largest AI supercomputer using an NVIDIA full-stack reference design with 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Compared to typical multi-year industry timeframes, Colossus was fully operational in 122 days and started running workloads only 19 days after the first servers were delivered. xAI will soon double the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, achieved by using the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.
2.) Grok 2 – The frontier language model with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities
3.) xAI API – Gives developers programmatic access to foundation models and is built on a new bespoke tech stack that enables multi-region inference deployments for low-latency access worldwide.
4.) Aurora – xAI’s proprietary autoregressive image generation model for Grok enhances multimodal understanding, editing, and generation capabilities
5.) Grok on 𝕏 – Utilizing the 𝕏 platform to understand what’s happening in real-time. xAI recently added new features enhancing the 𝕏 experience like web search, citations, and our recent image generator, Aurora
6.) xAI’s most powerful model yet Grok 3 is currently training and the company is now focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products that will utilize the power of Grok, Colossus, and X to transform the way we live, work, and play.
The funding from this round will be used to accelerate further our advanced infrastructure, ship products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the R&D of future technologies enabling “the company’s mission to understand the true nature of the universe.”
