Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion to challenge OpenAI

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has successfully raised $6 billion, with a valuation of $18 billion, accelerating its challenge to OpenAI, which he had previously supported.

Musk announced this Series B financing on May 26, less than a year after xAI first appeared, marking a significant investment in the development of artificial intelligence tools.

Currently, OpenAI has raised a total of $14 billion. xAI's single financing amount in less than a year has reached nearly half of OpenAI's total financing, showing investors' confidence in Musk.

The main investors in this financing round include Valor Equity Partners, a US venture capital firm led by Antonio Gracias, one of the initial investors in Tesla and SpaceX, the "mysterious" investment firm Vy Capital from Dubai, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Kingdom Holding from Saudi Arabia.

Vy Capital, headquartered in Dubai, is a relatively low-profile investment firm known as a "mysterious" investment company. The company invests globally in technology, finance, and other enterprises such as Counterpart, MobileCoin, and X Corp. (formerly Twitter).

Musk was an early supporter of artificial intelligence and had shown support before the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI. However, he later withdrew this support and advocated caution, believing that the technology poses potential risks.

In November, he launched Grok, a product competing with OpenAI's ChatGPT. This product was trained on X.com and has been integrated into the social network X.com (formerly Twitter). So far, this is the most remarkable product in xAI's work.

In the latest report, Musk also revealed his "supercomputing factory" plan. According to The Information, he plans to deploy a supercomputer by the fall of 2025, with a chip set that is expected to be four times the size of today's largest GPU cluster.

To train the next version of Grok, xAI is expected to require as many as 100,000 GPUs and plans to string these chips together into a supercomputer, also known as a computing gigafactory (Gigafactory of Compute) In its blog, xAI stated that it will use this funding to drive the launch of its first batch of products, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the development of future technologies.

Elon Musk and senior executives from Google and Tesla will officially announce the establishment of this artificial intelligence company in July