Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI raised $20 billion in a funding round
The AI startup xAI, founded by Elon Musk, completed a Series E funding round with a result of $20 billion, exceeding the initial target of $15 billion. Investors plan to support the development of the Colossus computing base.
The participants of the round include Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, as well as sovereign funds Qatar Investment Authority and MGX. Strategic support was provided by NVIDIA and Cisco Investments. The raised funds are planned to be directed towards expanding the capacities of the Colossus I and II supercomputers, which by the end of 2025 will already be one of the largest in the world, with over one million NVIDIA H100 graphics processors.
However, the development of the startup does not come without challenges. Among various incidents is the creation of fake news by Grok, the xAI news generation service, often due to the mistaken interpretation of sarcastic user posts as real. The company has also faced criticism over privacy issues, as xAI automatically used user data to train its models. Confidential data with requests, including instructions for manufacturing drugs and weapons, were even published once.
The Grok Imagine feature also caused public outcry due to its capability to create deepfakes of public figures, leading to calls for stricter filters from the public.
