Musk's AI raised 43.8 billion yuan, Huang Renxun and Su Zifeng also invested.

Source: Zhi Dongxi

What level is it to raise $12 billion in less than seven months?

This is the latest battle report handed over by xAI, the AI big model company founded by Musk.

Zhidx December 24th report, today, xAI announced that it has completed a $6 billion (approximately 43.8 billion RMB) Series C financing, with investors including A16Z, Blackrock, etc. Strategic investors Nvidia and AMD also participated and continue to support xAI’s rapid expansion of infrastructure.

xAI disclosed that this round of financing will be used to further accelerate its advanced infrastructure, launch groundbreaking products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies to achieve the company’s mission of understanding the true nature of the universe.

In addition to the $6 billion Series B financing announced in May this year, this new funding brings the total financing amount of xAI to $12 billion (approximately RMB 87.6 billion). This means that xAI’s valuation exceeds the previously rumored $50 billion, and is on par with JD.com’s total market value of $52.6 billion. In terms of valuation, xAI is now the second largest global model unicorn, second only to OpenAI.

Earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported in November this year that xAI told investors that it raised $5 billion in a financing round, achieving a valuation of $50 billion (approximately RMB 364.9 billion), more than double its valuation six months ago ($24 billion).

According to a filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, investors have donated at least $77,593 (with a total of 97 participants, but their identities were not disclosed in the filing).

According to the Financial Times, only investors who supported xAI in the previous round of financing are allowed to participate in this round. Investors who provided funding for Musk’s acquisition of Twitter can obtain up to 25% of xAI’s shares.

According to reports, xAI has informed investors of plans to raise more funds next year.

The most powerful model, Grok 3, in xAI is currently under training.

Currently, xAI is focused on introducing innovative new consumer and enterprise products that will leverage Grok, Colossus, and social platforms? to change the way people live, work, and entertain.

01***.***** expand the world’s largest AI supercomputer, **** will expand to 200,000 GPUs**

Musk founded xAI in July last year. Shortly after, the company released its flagship generative AI model Grok. The model currently supports many features on the social platform?, including a chatbot that is available to Premium subscribers and some free users in certain regions.

According to xAI, since May of this year, xAI has made significant technological progress and launched a number of key initiatives:

• Colossus, with the help of the world’s largest AI supercomputer built by xAI, has established a decisive hardware advantage. This supercomputer adopts Nvidia’s full-stack reference design and is equipped with 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs. Compared to typical industry time frames of multiple years, Colossus was fully operational in 122 days and began running workloads just 19 days after the first batch of servers was delivered. Soon, xAI will double the scale of Colossus to a total of 200,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs using Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet network platform.
• Grok 2, xAI is at the forefront of language models with the most advanced reasoning capabilities.
• xAI API, which allows developers to programmatically access their underlying models and build on a new custom tech stack, enabling multi-region inference deployment for globally low-latency access.
• Aurora, xAI is a proprietary autoregressive image generation model developed by Grok, which enhances the ability to understand, edit, and generate multimodal content.
• Grok on, use the platform to stay updated on what’s happening in the world. Recently, new features have been added to enhance the experience, such as web search, quoting, and the Aurora image generator.

Musk claims that the Memphis data center has the most powerful AI cluster in the world. xAI is training the next generation Grok model at the Memphis data center.

According to TechCrunch, the data center is currently partially powered by portable diesel generators. In November of this year, xAI obtained approval from the Memphis Power Authority to provide an additional 150MW of power, enough to supply electricity to approximately 100,000 households.

In order to win the support of the institution, xAI has promised to improve the quality of the city’s drinking water and provide Tesla-manufactured batteries to Memphis Electric at a discounted price. However, some residents criticize this move, believing it will put pressure on the grid and worsen the air quality in the area.

Tesla is expected to use its upgraded data center to improve its self-driving technology.

From an operational perspective, xAI has developed rapidly in its first year, growing from a dozen employees in March 2023 to over 100 today. In October of this year, xAI moved into the former office of OpenAI in the Mission community of San Francisco.

02.**Chasing AI competitors with all our might, ** revenue is about 100 million dollars this year

Musk is particularly focused on defeating OpenAI.

He is one of the founders of OpenAI and left the company in 2018 due to disagreements over its development direction. In the previous lawsuit, he argued that OpenAI had profited from his early involvement but had violated its nonprofit commitment to making AI research accessible to everyone. OpenAI responded that these accusations were baseless.

According to The Wall Street Journal, xAI has provided customer support for SpaceX’s Starlink internet service, and it is said that the startup is in talks with Tesla to provide research and development services in exchange for part of Tesla’s revenue.

Tesla shareholders oppose these plans. Some people have filed lawsuits against Musk for his decision to establish xAI, claiming that Musk has transferred talent and resources from Tesla to a company that is essentially a competitor.

These transactions and the development of xAI products for developers and consumers have pushed xAI’s annual income to about $100 million. In contrast, Anthropic is expected to generate $1 billion in revenue this year, while OpenAI aims to reach $4 billion by the end of 2024.

According to TechCrunch, Grok has the ‘rebellious personality’ described by Musk - willing to answer ‘sharp questions that most other AI systems refuse to answer.’ For example, when told to be vulgar, Grok would be happy to meet the user’s request and say some dirty words and vulgar language that ChatGPT wouldn’t say.

Grok itself is unwilling to cross certain boundaries and unwilling to avoid political issues. However, Musk has mocked ChatGPT and other AI systems for being too ‘woke’ and ‘politically correct’. He also claims that Grok ‘maximizes the pursuit of truth’ and is less biased than other competing models.

In the past year, Grok has gradually integrated into Gate.io. At the time of release, Grok was only available to VIP users, and developers must have sufficient skills to launch and operate the ‘open source’ version.

After integrating the image generator Flux, Grok can generate images on [] (controversially, without guardrails), as well as analyze images and summarize news and trend events (but not perfectly).

Reports indicate that Grok may handle more ? functions in the future, from enhancing ? search functionality and account profiles to aiding in post analysis and reply settings.

xAI is catching up with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, striving to stand out in the generative AI competition. The company launched an API in October, allowing customers to integrate Grok into third-party applications, platforms, and services, and has just released a standalone Grok iOS app to test users.

Musk insists that this is not a fair fight.

In the lawsuit against OpenAI and its close partner Microsoft, Musk’s lawyers accused OpenAI of “actively seeking to eliminate xAI and other competitors” by forcing investors to commit not to provide funding for them. Musk’s lawyers claimed that OpenAI also unfairly benefited from Microsoft’s infrastructure and expertise, which is “effectively a merger”.

Musk often says that data allows xAI to have a competitive advantage. Last month, ? changed its privacy policy to allow third parties, including xAI, to train models on ?’s posts.

According to the vision outlined in xAI, its model will be trained on data from Musk’s various companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, and then the model can improve the technologies of these companies.

03***.***** Conclusion: Global AI competition financing outbreak**

xAI is not the only AI big model company that raised a huge amount of funding.

Recently, the American unicorn Anthropic raised $4 billion in financing from Amazon, bringing its total financing to $13.7 billion, with a valuation of over $18 billion (approximately RMB 131.4 billion).

A larger super unicorn is OpenAI, which announced in October this year that it has raised $6.6 billion, bringing its total funding to $17.9 billion, with a post-investment valuation of $157 billion ($1.1459 trillion). In November this year, OpenAI was reported to have received a $1.5 billion investment from SoftBank Group in Japan.

PitchBook data shows that large-scale transactions such as OpenAI and Anthropic have driven AI venture capital activities to more than 2,000 transactions in the third quarter of 2024, with a total amount of 31.1 billion US dollars.

In the past month, domestic large-scale model companies have also released a large number of financing news: On December 11, Beijing-based model company MiBi Intelligence announced that it has recently completed a financing of hundreds of millions of yuan; on December 17, Beijing-based model unicorn Intellisense announced that it has recently completed a financing of 3 billion yuan; on December 18, Beijing AI video generation startup AiShi Technology announced that it has completed a financing of nearly 300 million yuan; on December 23, Shanghai-based model unicorn LeapStar was reported to have completed a hundreds of millions of US dollars Series B financing.

As 2024 draws to a close, fueled by the hot financing trend, the competition for large-scale models in the new year seems to be even more intense.