Elon Musk's xAI startup raises $6 billion to buy Nvidia chips

The xAI startup’s funding round could close this week, with $5 billion from funds in the Middle East and $1 billion from other investors, CNBC reported, with the money being used to buy about 100,000 Nvidia chips for its Colossus data center in Memphis.

Elon Musk's xAI startup raises $6 billion to buy Nvidia chips

xAI built the Colossus supercomputer from a cluster of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. In September, Elon Musk wrote in an X post that it took 122 days “from start to finish” to bring the cluster online, likely referring to the total project time.

The goal of xAI – a startup founded by Elon Musk in July 2023 – is to “understand the nature of the universe”. In November 2023, xAI launched the Grok chatbot after two months of training, competing directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude.

As Trump is elected President of the United States, Musk is actively working with the new administration to approach AI and technology on a larger scale.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump mentioned his plan to repeal President Joe Biden's executive order on artificial intelligence (AI) because it "impedes AI innovation and imposes radical leftist ideas on the development of technology."

Instead, Republicans have supported AI development from the standpoint of free speech and human flourishing.