UPDATED 18:11 EST / JANUARY 06 2026

AI

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $20B funding round backed by Nvidia and Cisco

Large language model developer xAI Corp. today announced that it has raised $20 billion in late-stage funding.

The Elon Musk-backed company says that Nvidia Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. participated in the Series E round. They were joined by Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, Baron Capital Group and others. In November, CNBC reported that xAI’s next funding round would value it at $230 billion.

The company will use the capital to expand its artificial intelligence infrastructure. It trains its flagship Grok series of LLMs using a supercomputer called Colossus that came online in September 2024. At the time, the system contained 100,000 graphics processing units. On occasion of today’s funding round, xAI disclosed that Colossus now hosts “over one million H100 GPU equivalents.”

Last week, Musk announced that the company had bought a new data center to expand the supercomputer’s processing capacity. The Information reported at the time that the facility is a former warehouse located outside Memphis. The building is reportedly close to a power plant that xAI is building to address Colossus’ energy requirements.

According to Musk, the planned upgrades will boost the supercomputer’s electricity consumption to 2 gigawatts. That’s enough to power more than one million households.

Musk praised Nvidia’s newly introduced Rubin graphics card in a statement issued on Monday. The remarks and Nvidia’s participation in xAI’s funding round hint that the chip, which features 366 billion transistors, might be part of xAI’s plans to expand Colossus. Rubin can run inference workloads with one tenth the cost per token of Blackwell.

In addition to building more infrastructure, xAI will use the funding round to launch new products. The company stated that the offerings will be geared towards both the consumer and enterprise markets.

Last month, xAI introduced an enterprise version of Grok that includes a Google Drive integration. Workers can use the chatbot to search the files they keep in the cloud storage service. Grok Enterprise, as the subscription tier is called, also includes cybersecurity tools. Organizations that sign up can define access controls and use their own encryption keys to protect business data.

In the coming months, xAI plans to add integrations with other third-party services besides Google Drive. The company will also roll out more collaboration features and the ability to create custom AI agents.

The updates are set to roll out alongside Grok 5, xAI’s next flagship LLM. The company disclosed today that it has already started training the model. It didn’t specify when Grok 5 will launch or what capabilities it will offer.

Today’s funding round comes a week after OpenAI Group PBC reportedly raised $22.5 billion from SoftBank Group Corp. The capital was provided as part of a $40 billion funding round the companies announced in March. Like xAI, OpenAI is building a significant amount of new data center infrastructure to support its AI training efforts.

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