Elon Musk's xAI closes a $20 billion funding round to supercharge AI infrastructure (www.businessinsider.com)

Elon Musk's xAI has successfully closed a $20 billion Series E funding round, significantly exceeding its initial target of $15 billion. This investment was backed by a range of prominent investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Nvidia, and Cisco Investments, aimed at enhancing the company’s AI infrastructure and product development. With this capital, xAI plans to expand its advanced AI capabilities and research initiatives, noting a notable milestone in its GPU capacity, reporting over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents within its supercomputers by the end of 2025. The funding is particularly significant as it positions xAI to leverage its affiliation with the social media platform X, which it acquired last year. This partnership is expected to feed vital data into Grok, xAI's flagship AI model and chatbot, as it progresses to its next iteration, Grok 5. Musk emphasizes the importance of scaling data capacity to achieve superintelligence, suggesting that xAI is poised to play a critical role in the ongoing AI arms race. The company’s aggressive hiring plans, fueled by the new funding, signal an ambitious roadmap for innovation that could reshape both consumer and enterprise landscapes in artificial intelligence.