On January 7th, Beijing time, Tesla Elon Musk's large-scale unicorn xAI announced the completion of its Series E funding round, raising $20 billion (approximately RMB 140 billion), exceeding its previous target of $15 billion. Elon Musk subsequently retweeted the funding announcement and expressed his gratitude to investors for their trust.
According to the official blog, this round of financing attracted investors including Valor Equity Investments and Fidelity Investments. Top global capital firms, including funds, the Qatar Investment Authority, and the Abu Dhabi-based MGX fund, participated. Additionally, Nvidia... and Cisco The two tech giants also participated in this funding round as strategic investors. Reportedly, they will support xAI in expanding its computing infrastructure and building the world's largest GPU cluster.
The announcement did not mention the valuation, but sources say that this round of financing will bring xAI's valuation to $230 billion, doubling the $113 billion valuation disclosed in March 2025, when Musk announced xAI's acquisition of the X platform (formerly Twitter), valuing xAI at $80 billion and the X platform at $33 billion.
In 2025, large-scale startups continued to raise substantial funds, with valuations soaring to astronomical figures. Currently, xAI ranks among the top three in valuation. The highest-valued company is OpenAI, which reached a valuation of $500 billion after completing a $6.6 billion share sale in October; while Anthropic reached a valuation of $138 billion after completing a $13 billion funding round in September. However, in November, news broke that Microsoft... Nvidia and OpenAI will invest $15 billion in Anthropic, which will push its valuation to approximately $350 billion. The combined valuation of these three large-scale unicorns —OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI—is estimated to be close to a trillion dollars.
Founded in July 2023, xAI has become a leading player in the large-scale data model market in just two years. Its Grok series models are performing competitively on leaderboards against Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT series, and Anthropic's Claude series. The announcement mentions that xAI has reached approximately 600 million monthly active users through the X and Grok apps. This rapid success is attributed to its strong fundraising capabilities and large-scale data center investments. invest.
Over the past two years, xAI has undergone multiple rounds of financing, the most recent of which was completed at the end of June 2025, raising a total of $10 billion, including $5 billion in debt financing and $5 billion in equity financing. Since 2024, xAI's total publicly disclosed financing amount has reached $42 billion (approximately RMB 293.4 billion).
However, the rate at which it burns through cash is equally staggering. Previous reports indicated that xAI was consuming as much as $1 billion per month, with its revenue currently far below its costs. Musk has publicly stated that massive losses like xAI's are not uncommon in the AI industry, primarily stemming from the high costs of server construction and chip procurement.
To support the development and training of Grok, Musk established the Colossus supercomputing center in Memphis, Tennessee, which was equipped with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs when it launched in July 2024. The official announcement mentioned that by the end of 2025, the Colossus I and II supercomputing centers had deployed more than one million H100 equivalent GPUs.
In the announcement, the company stated that Grok 5 is currently undergoing training and will focus on launching innovative consumer and enterprise products, reaching billions of users. This funding round for xAI will be used to accelerate their infrastructure development and drive groundbreaking research.
It is worth noting that xAI has recently faced regulatory scrutiny regarding its chatbot . Grok has sparked controversy for generating pornographic images of both minors and adults, drawing the attention of regulators worldwide. Authorities in the EU, UK, India, Malaysia, and France have all launched investigations into xAI. While most mainstream models explicitly prohibit the generation of pornographic images and videos, xAI positions Grok as a "more permissive and open" tool.
In response to the accusations, Musk posted on the X platform, stating that the platform would take measures to remove illegal content, permanently ban relevant accounts, and cooperate with official investigations if necessary. xAI stated that it is currently reviewing the matter to prevent similar issues from recurring.
(Article source: CBN)
