Musk's xAI Raises $20 Billion With Backing From Nvidia and Cisco
Elon Musk’s xAI has closed a $20 billion Series E funding round, surpassing its $15 billion target. Major investors include Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Fidelity, and Qatar Investment Authority. The funds will expand xAI’s infrastructure, particularly its extensive GPU clusters, and boost development of consumer and enterprise products using the Grok AI models and X platform. xAI’s recent growth includes expanding Colossus I and II data centers, now containing over one million H100 GPU equivalents, and ongoing development of Grok 5 and the image/video-generation tool Grok Imagine. The company is hiring aggressively to support these initiatives. Despite this investment, xAI faces regulatory scrutiny and backlash over Grok producing non-consensual deepfakes and illegal content, especially from European and Asian authorities. Concerns remain about xAI’s lack of voluntary compliance with established AI standards, with critics highlighting its focus on technological capability over explainability and safeguards against misuse.
