Millionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI has raised $20 billion in an upsized Series E funding round, exceeding a $15 billion target for the funding round.
Fresh funds
The financing aims to accelerate xAI’s infrastructure buildout, the development and deployment of transformative AI products, and funding research to advance “xAI’s core mission: Understanding the Universe,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Investors participating in the Series E funding round include Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, MGX, and Baron Capital Group, among others.
Strategic investors in the round include US chipmaker NVIDIA and Cisco Investments, who are existing collaborators on xAI’s compute infrastructure and on scaling the company’s Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) clusters, which xAI said are the largest in the world.
Net worth
Musk, the xAI and Tesla CEO and cofounder, had a net worth of $714.3 billion as of January 7, 2026, making him the wealthiest person in the world, Forbes estimates.
Scaling AI products
Last year, xAI deployed the fourth version of its large language model (LLM) chatbot, Grok 4, powered by supercomputer Colossus. According to the company, the world’s largest AI supercomputers Colossus I and II had over one million H100 GPU equivalents by the end of 2025.
Recent Grok products include Grok Voice, a voice agent producing real-time conversations, which is available in multiple languages on the Grok app and in Tesla vehicles. The company also launched Grok Imagine, an image and video AI generator, last year.
The AI company had 600 million monthly active users on its social media platform X and the Grok app in 2025.
The company also expanded its Grok chatbot in the enterprise market, launching Grok Business and Grok Enterprise in December 2025.
In the funding announcement, xAI said it would focus on launching new products tied to Grok, Colossus and X, with Grok 5 currently in the training phase. The company added that it was hiring staff “aggressively” to work on the company’s AI-focused initiatives.
Source: Forbes Middle East
