Elon Musk’s xAI raising up to $6 billion to purchase 100,000 Nvidia chips for Memphis data center

From CNBC:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is raising up to $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation, according to CNBC’s David Faber.

Sources told Faber that the funding, which should close early next week, is a combination of $5 billion expected from sovereign funds in the Middle East and $1 billion from other investors, some of whom may want to re-up their investments.

The money will be used to acquire 100,000 Nvidia chips, per sources familiar with the situation. Tesla’s Full Self Driving is expected to rely on the new Memphis supercomputer.

Musk’s AI startup, which he announced in July 2023, seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. Last November, xAI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company said was modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The chatbot debuted with two months of training and had real-time knowledge of the internet, the company claimed at the time.

With Grok, xAI aims to directly compete with companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which Musk helped start before a conflict with co-founder Sam Altman led him to depart the project in 2018. It will also be vying with Google’s Bard technology and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.

Now that Donald Trump is president-elect, Musk is beginning to actively work with the new administration on its approach to AI and tech more broadly, as part of Trump’s inner circle in recent weeks.

Trump plans to repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, according to his campaign platform, stating that it “hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology” and that “in its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”

• Category: Company news