[NEWS] Elon Musk's AI company "xAI" raises approximately 940 billion yen

xAI, an AI company founded by Elon Musk, announced on the 26th that it has successfully raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round.

The company said the funds will be used to "bring xAI's first product to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate technology research and development in the future."

So far, xAI has released an AI called "Grok" that can be used via X (formerly Twitter). The chatbot is currently only available to "X Premium" subscribers.

In a post on X, Musk announced that the company's valuation has reached $18 billion with this round of funding. Investors include Silicon Valley giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

In their latest research report, analysts at Deutsche Bank commented on the latest trends in AI, saying, "Continual improvements to already astonishingly powerful generative AI models show that this technology is becoming a must-have for industry leaders. Major industry players cannot afford to fall behind in the early race before they have established their market position."

AI investments by companies are accelerating

OpenAI, which announced ChatGPT in the second half of 2022, saw its valuation triple to $80 billion in one year. Of that, $13 billion was invested by Microsoft.

Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has raised about $8 billion, mainly from Amazon, and its valuation has reached about $15 billion. Major IT companies such as Google and Meta are also investing billions in their own AI technologies.

These investments reflect the high cost of operating generative AI systems, which require huge amounts of processing power to generate text, voice, and images. The hardware that supports AI development is quite expensive, with NVIDIA's Blackwell B200 AI graphics card costing around $30,000 to $40,000.

xAI may prepare 100,000 of NVIDIA's current H100 chips as an upgrade for Grok AI. Musk reportedly told investors that the company plans to set up a new data center by fall 2025.

Musk, who leads Tesla, SpaceX, and X, co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but has since left the company due to disagreements in the company's direction. Musk says that with this funding, he aims to win the AI ​​race against OpenAI and other companies and develop the most friendly AI for humanity.

Reference: Announcement
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