Artificial intelligence startup xAI Corp. has raised $6 billion in Series B funding round to support its product development and commercialization efforts.

The company, which was founded last year by Elon Musk, detailed on Sunday that the round saw the participation of than a half-dozen investors. The participants included Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, as well as others. The investment values xAI at $24 billion, up from $18 billion before.

The company said that it will use the proceeds from the round to bring its first commercial products to market. In parallel, x.AI will use a portion of the capital to build “advanced infrastructure.” The disclosure comes less than a week after The Information reported that the company plans to assemble a supercomputer with 100,000 H100 graphics processing units from Nvidia Corp. to support its AI development efforts.

The H100 was succeeded as the chipmaker’s flagship GPU in March by the newer Blackwell B200. When demand for the former processor was at its peak last year, retail prices reportedly reached $40,000. Even if the launch of the Blackwell B200 will cut the H100’s price by two-thirds, the 100,000-GPU supercomputer xAI reportedly plans to build would still cost more than $1 billion.

The Information’s sources indicated that the company plans to bring the system online by next fall. It’s believed xAI might collaborate with Oracle Corp. on the project. Building a large-scale AI training environment requires not only GPUs but also other hardware, such as storage systems, that the latter company could supply.

Three months after launching last July, X.ai introduced a large language model called Grok that can generate text and code. Since then, it has open-sourced the model and introduced a new, more capable version called Grok 1.5. During an internal test, the latter LLM correctly answered 74.1% of the questions in HumanEval, a popular benchmark used to assess neural networks’ problem-solving prowess.

In its brief announcement of the $6 billion funding round, xAI detailed that it’s working on “multiple exciting technology updates and products soon to be announced.” The company didn’t specify what products are in the pipeline. But in mid-April, when it introduced a version of Grok 1.5 that can process images, xAI disclosed that it seeks to advance significantly “both our multimodal understanding and generation capabilities in the coming months.”

Multimodal AI models are neural networks capable of processing data other than text. Over the past 12 months, xAI rival OpenAI has introduced AI models capable of generating images, videos and speech. It’s possible Elon Musk’s startup may be planning to take its commercialization effort in a similar direction.

Any new AI models that xAI trains will presumably become available through commercial application programming interfaces. It already offers Grok 1.0, the first iteration of its flagship LLM, through an API that is currently available through an early access program.

The company has also developed a desktop-based application designed to help developers more efficiently perform prompt engineering. That’s the task of fine-tuning prompts to maximize the quality of the output that an AI model, in this case Grok, produces. Some of xAI’s new funding might go toward building additional development tools for software teams adopting its AI models.

Photo: NASA/Wikimedia Commons