Elon Musk's xAI raises $6b

SAN FRANCISCO -- xAI, Elon Musk's company on artificial intelligence (AI), has raised $6 billion?in a Series C financing round, TechCrunch reported Wednesday.

The new cash brings xAI's total raised to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion?tranche xAI raised in May.

The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD, and others participated, the report said.

Kingdom Holdings, the Saudi conglomerate holding company, invested roughly $400 million?in the round, according to a public filing. The filing also revealed that xAI is now valued at $45 billion, nearly double its previous valuation.

According to the Financial Times, only investors who'd backed xAI in its previous fundraising round were permitted to participate.

"xAI's most powerful model yet ... is currently training and we are now focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products," xAI said in a statement. "The funds from this financing round will be used to further accelerate our advanced infrastructure, ship groundbreaking products ... and accelerate ... research and development."

Musk formed xAI last year. Soon after, the company released Grok, a flagship generative AI model that now powers a number of features on X, including a chatbot accessible to X Premium subscribers and free users in some regions.

Anthropic recently secured $4 billion?from Amazon, bringing its total raised to $13.7 billion, while OpenAI raised $6.6 billion?in October to grow its whole investment to $17.9 billion.

Megadeals like OpenAI's and Anthropic's drove AI venture capital activity to $31.1 billion?across over 2,000 deals in the third quarter of 2024, according to PitchBook data.