Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, has raised another $6 billion in its latest funding round, which includes participation from existing investor Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding, as well as the Qatar Investment Authority and Oman Investment Authority (OIA), among others.
The series C funding round comes after the AI company raised $6 billion from its series B round in May, in which Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his investment company Kingdom Holding took part.
Other investors from the previous round, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Sequoia Capital and Fidelity Management & Research Company, along with A16Z, BlackRock, Lightspeed, MGX and Morgan Stanley, took part in the latest fundraise, xAI said on Monday.
Global chip majors Nvidia and AMD also participated and "continue to support xAI in rapidly scaling our infrastructure", the company said.
San Francisco-based xAI is the developer of the Grok generative AI chatbot, which is a rival to the likes of Google's Gemini and market leader OpenAI's ChatGPT.
"The funds from this financing round will be used to further accelerate our advanced infrastructure, ship groundbreaking products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies enabling the company’s mission to understand the true nature of the universe," xAI said.
Last week, Oman's sovereign wealth fund OIA also confirmed that it acquired a stake in xAI, although it did not reveal the size and value of the deal. The move will allow the sultanate to "invest in advanced technologies within various investment sectors", the Oman News Agency said at the time.
Mr Musk launched xAI in July last year amid the growing demand for generative AI to compete with dominant market player OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft. The Musk-led company released its Grok-1 generative AI platform in November the same year.
Grok is being positioned by the company as a “conversational AI for understanding the universe” – aligned with Mr Musk's mission statement when he announced in July last year that xAI was meant “to understand reality” and “the true nature of the universe”.
At the time of Grok-1's launch, Mr Musk also said that xAI would make Grok open source, doubling down on his offensive against ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Since its previous round in May, xAI said it has established Colossus, the "world's largest AI supercomputer" using Nvidia chips, pushed out Grok 2, added Grok on X, and rolled out xAI API, which gives developers programmatic access to its foundation models.
Grok is only available to premium users of X. While xAI recently rolled out improvements to the platform, Mr Musk recently said on X that the upcoming new version, Grok 3, will be a "major leap forward".
