Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is raising $6 billion in new funding at a $18 billion valuation

Elon Musk’s AI startup, x.AI Corp., is nearing a deal to raise a massive $6 billion in a new funding round that would catapult the company’s valuation to a staggering $18 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg, citing an insider familiar with the matter.

Originally slated to haul in a modest $3 billion, but then everyone wanted in on the action, propelling the price tag upward. Joining the funding fray are Musk’s cronies at Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures, among other undisclosed investors, the sources told Bloomberg.

“Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup X.AI Corp. is nearing a deal to raise $6 billion in a funding round that would value the company at $18 billion, Bloomberg reported.

The latest news about the funding came just four months following Musk’s denial of a Financial Times report claiming xAI was close to raising $6 billion in fresh funding. Musk swiftly rebuffed the claim, stating, “xAI is not raising capital, and I have had no conversations with anyone in this regard,” in a post on X.

“We all received an email that basically said, ‘It’s now $6B on $18B, and don’t complain because a lot of other people want in,” another unamed source told TechCrunch.

If the $6 billion jackpot materializes, it would dwarf x.AI’s initial fundraising target of $1 billion, as disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the month prior. While x.AI’s $20 billion valuation pales in comparison to behemoth OpenAI’s, it falls in line with peers like Anthropic, backed by the likes of Google.

Musk unveiled x.AI’s grand entrance last July, touting its mission to unravel the cosmos’s enigmas. The team, assembled just ten months ago, boasts luminaries from tech titans like Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and Tesla, who’ve spearheaded groundbreaking projects such as DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s state-of-the-art chatbots, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

Simultaneously, Musk appears to be positioning x.AI as a heavyweight contender against established players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, renowned for their game-changing chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.

Although Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he distanced himself from its board in 2018, gradually voicing skepticism toward Big Tech’s AI ventures and expressing censorship apprehensions. Earlier this year, Musk set the stage for a showdown by announcing plans for a truth-centric AI, poised to uncover the universe’s fundamental truths, pitting him against Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI.