Written by Kate Conger
The artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, xAI, said Monday it has raised $6 billion, giving the startup a big lift as it competes with rivals including OpenAI.
The company said on its website that it will use the money to continue building its infrastructure and accelerate research and development. BlackRock, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital and others participated in the funding round.
“A lot of compute is required,” Musk said of the investment round in a post on X.
The fundraising could value xAI at $35 billion to $40 billion, up from $24 billion earlier this year, The New York Times previously reported.
Musk and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Musk is trying to play catch up on AI. The billionaire, who heads other companies including Tesla, X and SpaceX, publicly debuted xAI last year, a boom in the AI ​​industry that has spawned dozens of products that can generate text, images and even videos.
Musk quickly announced that Memphis would have the world’s largest supercomputer, powering Grok, xAI’s chatbot. Available to subscribers on Grok X.
Musk helped found OpenAI, but stepped away in 2018 after falling out with other co-founders, including its CEO Sam Altman.
Altman and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, have filed a lawsuit to prevent Musk from converting OpenAI from a nonprofit to a for-profit company, saying they violated the company’s founding agreement by putting commercial interests over the public interest. OpenAI has argued that the lawsuit is an attempt to hamstring the company while Musk builds a rival.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to the AI ​​system. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
Musk has argued that AI may destroy humanity, but he has the ability to build it more safely.
To jump-start xAI, Musk trained his AI on data from X. Several investors have also provided funding for the AI ​​startup in Musk’s bid to acquire X in 2022, including venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Investment Company, Kingdom Holdings. X has raised more than $12 billion in total.
This article originally appeared The New York Times.
Why should you buy our membership?
You want to be the smartest in the room.
You want access to our award-winning journalism.
You don’t want to be confused and misinformed.
Choose your subscription package