43.5 billion! Can Musk, who has raised a lot of funds, shake up the AI ​​landscape?

On May 26, Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI officially announced the completion of its Series B financing, attracting heavyweight investors including Valor Equity Partners led by former Tesla director Antonio Gracias, Dubai investment company Vy Capital, well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley's top venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, investment giant Fidelity, and Saudi Crown Prince's company Kingdom Holding.

It is reported that the amount raised in this round reached 6 billion US dollars (about 43.5 billion yuan), and the company's valuation also soared to 18 billion US dollars (about 130 billion yuan). This is also the largest single financing in the AI ​​field this year. It is no less than a thunderclap, pushing xAI, a company that was established less than a year ago, to a new unicorn that can compete with giants such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta.

Computing power to win

The announcement shows that xAI has made great progress in the past year. From the establishment of the company in July 2023, to the release of Grok-1 on X in November, to the recently announced improved Grok-1.5 model with long context capabilities, to Grok-1.5V with image understanding capabilities, xAI's model capabilities have been rapidly improved. With the open source release of Grok-1, xAI has opened the door to various applications, optimizations, and expansions of the model.

As for the $6 billion in financing xAI received, the announcement stated that it will be used to bring xAI's first products to market, build cash infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies. In a recent conversation with investors, Musk revealed that the funds will be used to rent a large number of AI chips and help xAI achieve a "computing super factory" integrating 100,000 GPUs by the second half of 2025.

Computing power is the key to the development of artificial intelligence.

According to reports, xAI is currently using about 20,000 Nvidia H100 chips to train its next-generation large language model Grok 2.0, but in order to train the more advanced Grok 3.0, Musk thinks that 100,000 H100 chips are barely enough. To this end, he hopes to integrate these 100,000 GPUs into a "computing power super factory" to form a computing power that is at least 4 times that of the current world's largest GPU cluster.

As early as a few months ago, there were reports that companies such as OpenAI and Microsoft were developing a supercomputer worth up to $100 billion with millions of GPUs. In comparison, the scale of xAI's "super factory" is much smaller.

Last words

In fact, this funding has made xAI the new unicorn with the highest financing scale for a single company in the field of artificial intelligence, second only to OpenAI.

In terms of overall financing scale, OpenAI has received a total of approximately US$14.3 billion in the past 10 years, far exceeding the single financing amount of xAI, including Microsoft's new round of US$10 billion investment in OpenAI in 2023. Anthropic, which is regarded as OpenAI's strongest rival, has also raised more than US$7 billion in total.

In comparison, although xAI’s $6 billion in financing is a huge amount, it is still not the top in the financing track of large model companies. However, it is worth mentioning that xAI was established only 10 months ago, and it can get $6 billion in financing in such a short time, which undoubtedly reflects the capital market’s optimism about its prospects.

Musk has strong leadership and execution in the field of science and technology. The achievements of Tesla and SpaceX are obvious to all, which is enough to show that Musk can turn crazy ideas into reality. In the emerging field of artificial intelligence, investors are obviously willing to give Musk enough trust.

As the former founder of OpenAI, he has his own unique insights on the development path of AI. In his opinion, artificial intelligence should benefit mankind rather than simply pursue profit maximization. Therefore, after disagreeing with OpenAI's current CEO Sam Altman, he withdrew from OpenAI. The establishment of xAI is an important step for Musk to realize his AI ideal.

Although xAI has not completely surpassed OpenAI at present, the Grok series of large models has demonstrated its impressive strength and has advantages in visual understanding, physical world cognition, and other aspects.

Capital is the biggest support for the development of artificial intelligence, but who will have the last laugh in the future depends on who has a more sufficient "powder storehouse" of technology. We should have expectations for this, but also have enough patience.

Because reality often deviates from the perfect theory we imagine, whether it is xAI or a large model, a step-by-step process is required to ensure that it can eventually achieve the ideal "universal" goal.

What will the future hold? Let’s look forward to it together.