The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 18th, citing multiple sources, that xAI, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) Start - Up, is in final talks to raise a new $15 billion equity investment, roughly 22 trillion won.
The proposed valuation this time is $230 billion, about 337 trillion won, roughly double the $113 billion disclosed after March when xAI took over X (formerly Twitter), Musk's social media platform. According to sources, Jared Birchall, who manages Musk's asset, shared terms for the new fundraising with investors that night.
However, it was not confirmed whether the corporations value he shared was a pre-money valuation or a post-money valuation.
Earlier, after U.S. business outlet CNBC reported on xAI's fundraising plans, Musk commented "false" on a related post by a user on X, WSJ said.
As AI competition intensifies, xAI and many other AI corporations are rapidly burning through funds to build infrastructure needed for training AI models and more. To shoulder expenditure that could reach trillions of dollars over the next few years, they are turning to continuous fundraising.
xAI has been raising large sums to boost the performance of its AI chatbot "Grok," which competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT. In June, it also raised a total of $10 billion through equity investments and bond issuance to build the "Colossus" hyperscale data center in Memphis, Tennessee. At that time, SpaceX, the space corporations led by Musk, invested $2 billion.
Musk has also publicly backed the idea of Tesla investing in xAI.