Elon Musk attended the US-Saudi Investment Forum held in Washington DC, USA on November 19, 2025.
Evelyn HochsteinReuter
Elon Musk’s xAI announced it has raised $20 billion in a funding round, exceeding its previous goal of $15 billion.
CNBC reported in November that the funding would value the artificial intelligence startup at about $230 billion. After initial reports that xAI was raising $15 billion, Musk called the story “false” in a post about X.
Also includes investors Nvidia and Investing in Cisco So are Musk’s longtime backers Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and Baron Capital Group.
Both Nvidia and Cisco are working with xAI as vendors and strategic partners.
AI startups reached sky-high valuations in 2025, raising huge sums of money to fuel seemingly endless demand for their underlying models. In October, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion stock sale at a valuation of $500 billion, and a month later, Anthropic was valued at approximately $350 billion with capital: microsoft And Nvidia.
Musk’s AI venture now owns and operates social network X after merging with the company formerly known as Twitter in March.
The company is facing new regulatory investigations by authorities in Europe, India and Malaysia after its Grok chatbot generated sexual images of children and non-consensual intimate images of adults, primarily women. Users shared the images widely on X.
Musk is focusing on building xAI infrastructure in Memphis, Tennessee. Local researchers say these data centers are powered by natural gas-fired turbines, much to the consternation of many nearby residents, as their emissions contribute to local air quality problems.
Despite the controversy, xAI was awarded a contract by the Department of Defense and recently added Grok to its AI agent platform. Grok is also the primary chatbot for predictive betting platforms Polymarket and Kalshi.
Spotlight: xAI raises $20 billion
