The company, whose flagship product is the Grok chatbot, has attracted backing from U.S. venture capitalists, chipmakers NVIDIA and AMD, and investment funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among others.
Musk has repeatedly warned that AI poses risks to human civilization, but has pushed for more investment in the field, with xAI already raising $6 billion in May.
The company is now one of the world’s most valuable startups, with an estimated valuation of $50 billion, but still behind its main competitor, OpenAI, whose estimated valuation is $157 billion.
Despite sky-high estimates, critics point out that AI companies are running out of cash and still don’t see a clear path to profitability.
Announcing the funding on Monday, xAI said it would use the cash infusion to “ship groundbreaking products used by billions of people.”
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It will also “accelerate research and development of future technologies that enable the company’s mission of understanding the nature of the universe.” Musk is also the president of SpaceX and Tesla, and a major supporter of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. He wrote on his X account that powering AI products “requires a lot of computing.”
He launched the company in July 2023, shortly after signing an open letter calling for a moratorium on the development of powerful AI models.
Musk is currently taking legal action against OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. The company was co-founded as a nonprofit organization in 2015 and retired in 2018. It claims the conversion to a for-profit company violates legally binding promises.
