xAI raises $6bn Series C at ~$50bn valuation with Nvidia and AMD as investors

xAI said it had closed a $6 billion Series C funding round, with backers including Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding, and, as new strategic investors, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD. The company’s own announcement did not disclose a valuation; press reporting on the figure varied, from just over $40 billion to roughly $50 billion, roughly double the $24 billion xAI had been valued at after its Series B seven months earlier.

Nvidia and AMD’s participation was unusual for two companies that primarily sell xAI the hardware it runs on rather than typically taking equity stakes in customers, and was widely read as both a vote of confidence and a way of tying a large GPU buyer more closely to its suppliers. xAI said the funds would go toward infrastructure, including further expansion of its Colossus supercomputer, and toward shipping consumer and enterprise products; the company said it was training its next model at the time.

The round brought xAI’s total disclosed fundraising for 2024 to roughly $12 billion across the two rounds, funding a company Elon Musk had founded in mid-2023 to compete directly with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic on frontier model training despite starting years behind on both models and infrastructure.