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Regional investors rush to Musk’s $6bn xAI funding round

By Carla Sertin
Elon Musk xAI funding NBC/SNL/Zuma
Elon Musk raised another $6 billion for his xAI venture
  • Saudis, Qataris and Omanis join in
  • Chipmakers also participate
  • Kingdom Holdings’ second bite

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI has attracted funding from regional investors including Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding, the Qatar Investment Authority and the Oman Investment Authority. 

The latest Series C funding round for xAI has closed after raising $6 billion from backers such as BlackRock, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital and Valor Equity Partners, as well as the three Gulf funds.

Kingdom Holding invested SAR1.5 billion ($400 million) in the latest funding round. It comes after xAI’s $6 billion Series B funding round in May, in which Kingdom Holding also participated.

Global technology players such as the chipmakers Nvidia and AMD also participated in this latest round.

XAI said the funds from this financing round would be used on infrastructure, products and research and development.

OIA revealed last week that it bought a stake in xAI. The Omani sovereign wealth fund said the move aligned with its broader objective to invest across innovative sectors including advanced technology.

Since xAI’s inception in July last year, it has rapidly scaled its operations and technology to compete with AI titans such as OpenAI.

After its Series B round, xAI established the supercomputer Colossus using Nvidia chips and released the second iteration of its generative AI chatbot Grok, which it describes as “conversational AI for understanding the universe”.

It also launched xAI API, to enable developers to access its foundation models.

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