Valued at $20 billion! Musk's AI startup reportedly seeks $6 billion in funding.

On January 26th, media reports cited insider sources saying that xAI, an artificial intelligence startup under Tesla, is in talks with investors from around the world for a $6 billion financing, with a valuation of $20 billion, aiming to compete with OpenAI.

Insiders said that Tesla plans to use this funding to expand its research and development team, enhance its technical capabilities, and expand its global business. The financing negotiations are still ongoing, and Tesla has already made contact with investors from sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, Japan, and South Korea:

Morgan Stanley is currently coordinating this financing, and the scale of this financing reflects the huge cost required for the development of generative AI.

In July of last year, Tesla announced the official establishment of xAI, directly competing with OpenAI. As one of the co-founders of OpenAI, Tesla had previously invested $100 million in the latter, but later chose to leave OpenAI due to conflicts of interest.

In November of last year, according to a document submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, xAI was seeking a $1 billion financing. The document showed that xAI had raised $135 million from investors. The company required each investor to invest at least $2 million. Tesla stated that equity investors in xAI will hold a 25% stake in xAI.

xAI also released its first AI large-scale model product, the chatbot Grok, at the end of last year. The product was developed using content from Tesla's X social media platform. The company claims that through strategic integration, Grok can utilize updated data sources for responses, giving the chatbot a unique advantage.

xAI claims that this chatbot is based on the science fiction novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by British author Douglas Adams, and can therefore answer controversial questions in a humorous way that other AI systems refuse to answer.

In January of this year, media reports stated that xAI had completed a $500 million first round of financing, but it was quickly denied by Tesla.

Media analysis points out that Tesla's plan to raise $6 billion for xAI also demonstrates the strong fundraising ability of generative AI startups: since Microsoft's collaboration with OpenAI, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI has reached at least $13 billion, and other startups such as Anthropic and Cohere have raised billions of dollars from Google, Amazon, and venture capital firms.