xAI raises $6 billion in Series C funding to improve AI infrastructure

Generative AI firm xAI has raised $6 billion in funding to improve its Large Language Models (LLMs) and enrich Grok AI chatbot with new technologies.

This fund comes under a Series C round, which closed with a total $6 billion from A16Z, Blackrock, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holdings, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Vy Capital.

The company also announced strategic investors Nvidia and AMD, which also participating in xAI’s infrastructure development to scale operations.

A similar amount was raised under Series B funding in May 2024 featuring Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Kingdom Holding, and more.

Since then, the company has been working on new objectives including the launch of the Colossus supercomputer cluster.

This cluster equips 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It was the fastest AI cluster build in 122 days and completed all operational capabilities in only 19 days.

In August, xAI launched Grok 2 family models with improved reasoning and data comprehension for training and fast responses. This model can also generate images based on a text description.

xAI Grok (Source – X)

The company has also unveiled xAI API for developers to access foundation models and allow multi-region inference deployment for low-latency access.

With increased efforts, the xAI team has developed its own Aurora image generation model, which can generate photo-realistic images for Grok users.

In addition, Grok has received several new features over the past month. These will provide source citations in responses, web searches, image and file analysis, and more.

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