Source: Cailian
Financial Associated Press, September 20 (Editor Niu Zhanlin) According to media reports citing people familiar with the matter, xAI, an artificial intelligence startup owned by Elon Musk, is raising US $10 billion in new funds from investors. The valuation reached US $200 billion.
If the plan goes ahead, this will be another "rocket-like" jump in the valuation of basic large-scale model companies after Anthropic completed a US $13 billion financing at a valuation of US $183 billion at the beginning of the month. At present, the industry leader OpenAI is valued at as high as US $500 billion in equity transfers in the secondary market.
Despite the continued questioning of the pace of the technology industry’s “burning” of money, funds are still crazyly flowing to the AI track. This could also make xAI one of the world’s highest market-value unlisted companies, just behind OpenAI, China byte jump and Musk’s own SpaceX.
It is worth noting that just weeks ago, xAI raised $10 billion through loans and cash investments, valued at around $150 billion at the time. In December last year, xAI also raised $6 billion to drive its AI research and development.
However, behind the estimate of high-speed expansion, xAI has repeatedly fallen into the whirlwind of public opinion due to product ethics issues, and its Grok chatbot was exposed to leaking 370,000 private chat records from users last month.
Industry insiders generally believe that Grok lags behind Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT large model in terms of capabilities and user scale.
In March this year, Musk announced a full-stock merger between xAI and its social platform X, when xAI was valued at $80 billion, while X was valued at $33 billion. Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 for about $44 billion and subsequently changed its name to X.
Musk said in May he planned to purchase 1 million artificial intelligence chips. It is expected that most of the funds from this round of financing will be used to build data centers equipped with Nvidia and AMD GPUs in Memphis and other places to develop next-generation artificial intelligence models while attracting high-cost talents.
To compete more strongly with companies like OpenAI, xAI has been accelerating the scale of data center computing, with its supercomputer cluster “Colossus” in Memphis, Tennessee, known as the world’s largest.
On the other hand, Tesla’s board earlier this month had asked shareholders to approve a new remuneration scheme that could be worth $1 trillion in extreme cases, while Musk said he did not support xAI’s merger with Tesla.
In response to the above financing reports, Musk recently replied on the social media platform that it was fake news, and XAI has not raised any funding at the moment.