UPDATED 18:09 EST / JULY 01 2025

AI

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $10B to upgrade its AI infrastructure

Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings Corp. has raised $10 billion from investors to finance artificial intelligence initiatives.

The deal was announced today by Morgan Stanley, which helped the company raise the funds.

The investment comprised $5 billion in equity funding and $5 billion worth of loans. Some of the loans were structured as secured notes, which means that xAI provided collateral to lenders. A number of other players in the AI market have used their graphics cards as collateral to raise debt.

Morgan Stanley stated that the investment will “support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data centers and its flagship Grok platform.”

Last year, xAI built a sprawling data center in Memphis to support its AI training efforts. The facility houses a supercomputer called Colossus that featured 100,000 graphics cards when it first came online. This past May, xAI disclosed that the system’s AI accelerator count has since doubled.

The company plans to deploy another 800,000 graphics cards down the road. The $10 billion round disclosed today should make it easier for xAI to finance the initiative.

To support its infrastructure roadmap, the company bought a 1 million-square-foot site in Memphis earlier this year. The deal was reportedly worth $80 million. The campus, which is located near a power plant, is expected to host a data center with up to 350,000 graphics cards.

At times when household power consumption is high, the amount of electricity available to data centers can decrease. To mitigate the impact of such fluctuations, xAI recently deployed more than 165 Megapack energy storage systems at its new Memphis site. The batteries, which are made by Tesla Corp., can each hold 3.9 megawatt hours of electricity. That’s enough to power about 3,600 homes for one hour.

Alongside the energy storage array, xAI is building what it describes as the world’s largest ceramic membrane. It’s a water treatment system that can make wastewater suitable for data center cooling. According to xAI, the system will make it possible to reuse more than 13 million gallons of wastewater per day.

The company is using Colossus to power its flagship Grok series of large language models. The newest addition to the series, Grok 3, debuted in February. It was trained using 10 times more hardware than the company’s earlier LLMs and performs reasoning tasks more reliably.

The investment announced today is the third multibillion-dollar round that xAI has closed since the start of 2024. The previous deal, a $6 billion raise that was announced in November, valued the company at $50 billion. That number increased to $80 billion when xAI merged with X in March.

Image: Unsplash

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