Musk's xAI raises $20 billion in Series E funding

Elon Musk’s xAI, and developer of the Grok chatbot, has announced that it has raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round.

In a blog post, the company said investors include Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity and the Qatar Investment Authority. It also named Nvidia and Cisco as strategic investors. xAI did not disclose whether the funding was raised through equity, debt or a combination of both.

xAI, which also owns the social media platform X, said it has about 600 million monthly active users across X and Grok. The company said the new funding will be used to expand its data centre capacity and further develop its AI models.

The funding announcement comes as the company faces scrutiny over the use of its AI chatbot. Over the weekend, some X users prompted Grok to generate sexualised deepfake images of real people, including women. According to reports, the chatbot complied with those requests, raising concerns about the creation of sexual abuse material and other nonconsensual sexual content.

xAI is now under investigation by authorities in several jurisdictions, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia and France.

While Elon Musk and Grok have released public apologies, the company has not publicly commented on the investigations.