xAI Raises $20 Billion to Accelerate AI Product Development and Infrastructure Buildout

xAI raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round to accelerate its progress in building advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

This result exceeded the $15 billion the company targeted in the round, it said in a Tuesday (Jan. 6) press release.

“This financing will accelerate our world-leading infrastructure buildout, enable the rapid development and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, and fuel groundbreaking research advancing xAI’s core mission: Understanding the Universe,” the company said in the release.

Among the strategic investors in the round are Nvidia and Cisco Investments, according to the release.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC in October that his company was participating in xAI’s latest funding round.

Huang said he was “super excited” about the funding opportunity and added that he wished he could give xAI and its founder and owner, Elon Musk, even more money.

“Almost everything that Elon is part of, you really want to be a part of as well,” Huang said.

In a Tuesday post on X, Musk said: “Congrats to the [xAI] team and thank you to investors for your faith in our company.”

Musk also reposted a post that said xAI is looking to recruit AI Finance Tutors to train the company’s AI model Grok.

During 2025, xAI continued to expand its Colossus I and Colossus II data centers, ending the year with over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents; refined the intelligence, reasoning and agency of Grok; served millions of users with the intelligent voice agent Grok Voice; and offered the image and video generation models Grok Imagine, according to the Tuesday press release.

Grok now reaches about 600 million monthly active users across the Grok and X apps, the release said. xAI owns the social media platform X.

“Looking ahead, Grok 5 is currently in training, and we are focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products that harness the power of Grok, Colossus and X to transform how we live, work and play,” xAI said in the release.

In September, xAI announced that federal agencies can access Grok models for 42 cents per agency for 18 months, through March 2027.