Musk’s A.I. Firm Raises $6 Billion in Race With Rivals
The New York Times
Elon Musk, who founded xAI last year, has said the business “still has a lot of catching up to do” as it looks to compete with well-funded companies like OpenAI.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said on Sunday that it had raised $6 billion, helping to close the funding gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and other rivals in the red-hot industry.
The funds would be used “to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the company said in a statement.
Mr. Musk, who founded xAI in July, said in a social media post that the funding round valued the company at $18 billion, not including the new money. Investors included the Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, along with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Investors and large tech companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions into the businesses developing A.I. systems, looking to profit as they’re integrated into many aspects of business and daily life. These investments also reflect the steep costs of running generative A.I. systems, which require huge amounts of processing power to generate text, sounds and images.
In a recent research report about the latest developments in A.I., analysts at Deutsche Bank noted that “the constant improvements to already strikingly powerful generative A.I. models show how the technology has rapidly become table stakes for the industry leaders.” They said the major players in the industry could not “afford to fall behind in the early jostling before market positions are entrenched.”
OpenAI, which unveiled the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, has roughly tripled its valuation over the past year or so, to $80 billion, with some $13 billion in backing from Microsoft. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has raised roughly $8 billion, much of it from Amazon, and reached a valuation of about $15 billion. Tech giants like Google and Meta have also spent heavily on their own A.I. technologies, which are quickly being incorporated across their product lineups.
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