Elon Musk‘s xAI, the artificial intelligence company that also owns Musk’s social platform X, has raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round, as the AI boom continues unabated.
The company announced the funding round on its website, disclosing a list of strategic investors that include NVIDIA and Cisco, as well as sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi and Qatar, Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity, and Baron Capital Group.
The company had been targeting $15 billion in the raise, but demand from investors in advanced AI startups appears to be outpacing supply for now.
Of course, xAI is no ordinary AI startup. Founded by Musk, it controls one of the most influential social media platforms on the planet in X, which is also in the exclusive content business (on Tuesday X announced a deal with the NFL for season two of the NFL’s Top 100 series). xAI also created the Grok chatbot, which utilizes realtime data from X when delivering answers to questions.
Other major startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have also raised tens of billions of dollars in recent months.
xAI raised $6.6 billion in a major round back in 2024, and a year later inked a deal to acquire X in an all-stock transaction that values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45 billion, his original take-private price, minus $12 billion in debt).
While the company did not confirm its valuation in the round, The Information previously pegged the value at around $230 billion, underscoring just how rapidly the AI space is advancing.
The valuations also underscore how massive the sector is getting in comparison to media and entertainment, and with AI firms eager to gobble up the works of Hollywood for training purposes, every new deal is another data point that underscores the value of creative work.
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