AI venture capital is booming! Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion with big names like NVIDIA joining in

According to regulatory documents, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has raised $6 billion. This round of financing involved 97 investors, with a minimum investment amount of $77,593, but the documents did not disclose the specific identities of the investors. xAI recently announced that investors include Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA (NVDA.US), and AMD (AMD.US).

AI Venture Capital Booms

This round of financing brings xAI's total funding to $12 billion. Media reports in November indicated that xAI's valuation target is $50 billion, double that of six months ago.

Reportedly, only investors who supported xAI in the previous round of financing were allowed to participate in this round. It was reported that investors who funded Musk's acquisition of Twitter could receive up to 25% of xAI's shares.

It has been reported that xAI has informed investors of plans to raise more funds next year.

This is not the only AI lab to raise substantial funds. Anthropic recently secured $4 billion from Amazon, bringing its total funding to $13.7 billion, while OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October, increasing its total funding to $17.9 billion.

According to PitchBook data, large deals like those of OpenAI and Anthropic have driven AI venture capital activity to $31.1 billion in the third quarter of 2024, with over 2,000 deals.

Musk's AI Ambitions

Musk founded xAI last year. Shortly thereafter, the company released its flagship generative AI model Grok, which currently powers many features on X, including a chatbot available to X Premium subscribers and some free users in certain regions.

Musk has mocked ChatGPT and other AI systems for being too "woke" and "politically correct," although Grok also avoids political topics. He has described Grok as "maximally truth-seeking" and less biased than other competing models, despite evidence suggesting Grok leans left.

xAI is rapidly catching up to powerful competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. The company launched an API in October that allows customers to integrate Grok into third-party applications, platforms, and services. It has just released a standalone Grok iOS app to testing users.

Musk has frequently stated that the data from X gives xAI an advantage over its competitors. Last month, X changed its privacy policy to allow third parties, including xAI, to use posts from X to train models.

Notably, Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, but he left the company in 2018 due to disagreements over its direction. Musk claimed in a lawsuit against OpenAI that the organization benefited from his early contributions while violating its nonprofit commitment to make AI research accessible to everyone equallyxAI also outlined its vision, which states that its models will be trained using data from Musk's various companies (including Tesla and SpaceX), and then its models can improve the technologies of these companies.

However, Tesla shareholders oppose these plans. Some have sued Musk over his decision to establish xAI, claiming that Musk is diverting talent and resources from Tesla to a company that is essentially a competitor.

Nevertheless, these transactions have pushed xAI's revenue to approximately $100 million per year. In comparison, it has been reported that Anthropic's revenue is expected to reach $1 billion this year, while OpenAI aims to reach $4 billion by the end of 2024