Musk’s A.I. Firm Raises $6 Billion in Race With Rivals

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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said on Sunday that it had raised $6 billion, helping to close the funding gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and other rivals in the red-hot industry. The funds would be used “to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the company said in a statement. Mr. Musk, who founded xAI in July, said in a social media post that the funding round valued the company at $18 billion, not including the new money. Investors included the Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, along with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Investors and large tech companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions into the businesses developing A.I. systems, looking to profit as they’re integrated into many aspects of business and daily life. These investments also reflect the steep costs of running generative A.I. systems, which require huge amounts of processing power to generate text, sounds and images.