xAI closes $6 billion in Series C funding from A16Z, Blackrock, Sequoia, NVIDIA, and others

After weeks of speculation, Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has closed a massive $6 billion Series C funding round. This latest investment includes high-profile names like A16Z, Blackrock, and Fidelity Management & Research Company.

Other notable backers include Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital. NVIDIA and AMD, who have been long-time supporters of xAI, also joined the round, bolstering the company’s efforts to expand its infrastructure.

The new funds will drive xAI’s mission to scale its infrastructure, roll out products designed for billions of users, and advance research into cutting-edge technologies. The company’s ultimate goal? To explore and understand the true nature of the universe.

This milestone comes just seven months after xAI secured $6 billion in Series B funding, which valued the company at $24 billion post-money. That round supported the launch of xAI’s initial products, strengthened its infrastructure, and propelled its research and development efforts.

“We have closed our Series C funding round of $6 billion with participation from key investors including A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital, amongst others,” xAI said on its website.

In early November, reports emerged that xAI was in discussions with NVIDIA for additional funding aimed at accelerating its work on a large language model. Around the same time, the company was also rumored to be raising $5 billion at a valuation of approximately $45 billion.

Since its Series B announcement back in May, xAI has achieved key milestones, including:

• Colossus: The world’s largest AI supercomputer, built with NVIDIA’s full-stack reference design, featuring 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Remarkably, Colossus became operational in just 122 days, with workloads running within 19 days of server delivery. Plans are underway to double its capacity to 200,000 GPUs using NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.
• Grok 2: A cutting-edge language model with advanced reasoning capabilities.
• xAI API: A developer tool offering programmatic access to xAI’s foundation models. It features a custom tech stack designed for multi-region, low-latency deployment.
• Aurora: An advanced autoregressive image-generation model enhancing multimodal capabilities in understanding, editing, and creation.
• Grok on : Integrating xAI’s models with the platform to provide real-time insights. Recent updates include features like web search, citations, and the Aurora image generator.

Looking ahead, xAI is training Grok 3, its most advanced model yet, while preparing to launch innovative consumer and enterprise products. These new offerings aim to reshape how people work, live, and interact with technology.

Launched by Musk in July 2023, xAI set out with a mission to explore the universe’s deepest mysteries. The xAI team includes top talent from companies like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft Research, and Tesla—people who have driven advancements such as DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Musk appears to be positioning xAI as a formidable player in the AI space, aiming to compete with giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, each known for their flagship AI models.

Although Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he left the board in 2018 and has since voiced skepticism about Big Tech’s direction in AI, citing concerns about potential censorship. Musk’s recent AI vision includes a “truth-focused” AI, designed to counter offerings like Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI by exploring fundamental truths about the universe.