Elon Musk listens as US President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Allison Robert Getty Images
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI raised $6 billion in a $50 billion valuation, according to CNBC’s David Faber.
Sources told Faber that the financing, which should close early next week, is a combination of $5 billion expected from sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and $1 billion from other investors, some of whom want to increase their investment again.
The money will be used to earn 100,000 Nvidia Chips, each source is familiar with the situation. Tesla‘s Full Self Driving is expected to rely on the new Memphis supercomputer.
Musk’s AI startup, announced in July 2023, seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. Last November, xAI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company said was modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The chatbot debuted with two months of training and has real-time knowledge of the internet, the company said at the time.
With Grok, xAI aims to directly compete with companies including the creator of ChatGPT OpenAI, which Musk helped before a conflict with founder Sam Altman led him to leave the project in 2018. It will also compete with Google’s Bard technology and chatbot Claude Anthropic. .
Now that Donald Trump is president-elect, Musk has begun actively working with the new administration on a broader approach to AI and technology, as part of Trump’s inner circle in recent weeks.
Trump plans to revoke President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, according to his campaign platform, stating that it “blocks AI Innovation, and applies Radical Leftist ideas to the development of this technology” and “in its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing .”
