Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has raised $6 billion to accelerate its development.
The funds will be used to enhance xAI’s “cutting-edge infrastructure,” the company stated, which aims to be a direct competitor to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
“A strong computing capacity is necessary,” Musk commented on his social media platform X on Tuesday.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX recently became an advisor to President-elect Donald Trump.
xAI plans to double the capacity of its AI supercomputer, Colossus, by increasing the number of its Nvidia graphics chips from 100,000 to 200,000 to train its AI models, such as Grok.
Investors in this latest funding round include Nvidia, semiconductor manufacturer AMD, BlackRock, Sequoia Capital, and Morgan Stanley.
Launched in July 2023, xAI had already raised $6 billion in May, and its valuation is now estimated at around $50 billion.
Elon Musk recently made his AI, Grok 2, available for free on X, allowing users to generate text and various images from simple natural language prompts, raising discussions about the risk of misinformation.
The billionaire is in a race against other tech giants to lead the development of generative AI, which gained global attention with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
In early October, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion funding round, valuing it at $157 billion.
Microsoft (the principal investor in OpenAI), Google, Amazon, Meta, and others have spent billions of dollars launching tools that can easily produce high-quality text, images, and videos, and can now also engage in voice conversations.
