Almost lost in all the talk about the energy needs of the Colossus supercomputer is the fact that startup xAI managed to attract another $6 billion in funding from a group of institutional and strategic investors. Among the latter, Elon Musk’s company openly mentions AMD and Nvidia, which help it develop its computing infrastructure.
Image source: xAI
Among the institutional investors who invested in xAI capital as part of the third round of fundraising, there are representatives not only of the American financial sector, but also companies from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The previous round of xAI funding came in May of this year. Until recently, it was believed that during the third round xAI would be able to raise about $5 billion and thereby estimate its own capitalization at $50 billion. It turns out that in practice both values were exceeded.
AMD and Nvidia, according to xAI representatives, continue to contribute to the rapid expansion of the company’s computing infrastructure. As noted on the pages of the corporate blog, xAI expects to double the number of Nvidia accelerators with Hopper architecture installed in the Colossus supercomputer to 200,000 units in a short time.
The company’s most modern language model, Grok 3, according to xAI management, is now used to prepare innovative products for both private and corporate clients of the company. Participation in the financing of xAI by AMD and Nvidia may indicate their interest in supporting developers of artificial intelligence systems, who currently rely entirely on their component base. Cloud giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta✴, for example, are interested in creating their own processors and computing accelerators. However, recently published information suggests that Microsoft is more dependent on Nvidia than others in this regard.