[News Space=Reporter seungwon lee] Elon Musk's xAI has attracted an additional $6 billion (approximately KRW 8.7 trillion) in investment, once again proving its presence as a latecomer in the artificial intelligence (AI) market led by OpenAI.
As the conflict between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk over leadership in the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem intensifies into lawsuits and a war of public opinion, attention is focused on whether xAI will be able to raise additional large-scale funds and change the landscape of the AI market. Musk participated in the establishment of OpenAI in 2015, but resigned from his position as a director and sold all of his investment shares in 2018 due to differences of opinion with Sam Altman. Afterwards, he established AI development startup xAI in July 2023 as a rival to OpenAI.
According to major foreign media outlets such as the Financial Times and TechCrunch on the 24th (local time), xAI, an AI company founded by CEO Musk, announced that it raised 6 billion dollars (approximately 8.7 trillion won) through a document submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on December 19. Major investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, Fidelity, Nvidia, AMD, and Morgan Stanley.
This investment brings the total amount raised by xAI to $12 billion (KRW 17.4 trillion) to date. xAI’s corporate value has also doubled to $50 billion in just six months.
The Financial Times explained that “only investors who supported xAI in previous funding rounds could participate in this investment,” and that “investors who funded CEO Musk’s Twitter acquisition could have access to up to 25% of xAI’s shares.”
This investment attraction is the result of Musk's unique global network and influence combined. In particular, it is analyzed that the investment support from key figures in politics and economics close to him, the 'Trump Line', played a major role. This is expected to be an important turning point in accelerating Musk's long-term strategy to secure AI technology and industry leadership beyond simple corporate funding.
xAI is currently developing a generative AI model called ‘Groc’ and applying it to various functions of X (formerly Twitter). It is also moving quickly as a latecomer to catch up with competitors that have already taken over the market, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. In particular, it released an API last October to enable customers to integrate Groc into third-party apps and services.
Musk's ultimate goal is to develop 'AGI' with human-level intelligence. Accordingly, xAI plans to invest the funds raised this time in AI technology development and research, data center expansion, and global talent acquisition.
Recently, it released a standalone app for iOS to test users. On X, it started offering 'Grock 2' for free. 'Grock 2' was first released in mid-August, but was previously only available to X Premium subscribers who pay $7 per month.