Elon Musk's AI company xAI secured $6 billion in Series C funding from a group of heavyweight investors, including chipmakers NVIDIA and AMD.
The list of backers includes major venture capital players like Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), along with financial giants Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, and Morgan Stanley.
Since its last $6 billion funding round in May 2024, xAI says it has hit several major technical milestones. The company built "Colossus," a massive supercomputer powered by 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.
The system went from initial delivery to full operation in just 122 days, with training starting only 19 days after the first servers arrived, the company says. Looking ahead, xAI plans to double Colossus's processing power to 200,000 GPUs using NVIDIA's Spectrum-X Ethernet network platform.
Grok 3 is in training
This year, xAI has released several new products, including the Grok 2 language model, a developer API, and Aurora, an image generation system for its Grok chatbot. The company says Grok 3 is in training.
While Musk promised earlier this summer that Grok 3 would be the "world's most powerful AI by every metric by December," xAI's funding announcement is silent on that timeline. But there's still a week to go.
This comes at a time when the AI industry is seeing a shift in approach - pre-training of large language models appears to have hit a wall, with neither OpenAI nor Google releasing more capable LLMs this year. Instead, the industry is moving toward a new paradigm called test-time compute scaling.
The fresh funding will help xAI expand its infrastructure and develop new products. The company says it's focused on building advanced AI systems that are "truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity."
X (formerly Twitter) recently added a new Grok feature that automatically provides context for posts on the platform. Interestingly, the system pulls from both X posts and traditional media sources - the same "legacy media" outlets that Musk often slams for spreading what he calls lies and misinformation.
