Elon Musk attends the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, November 19, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
That of Elon Musk xAI said it raised $20 billion in a funding round, surpassing its previous target of $15 billion.
CNBC reported in November that funding would value the artificial intelligence startup at around $230 billion. After an initial report that xAI was raising $15 billion, Musk called the story “fake” in a post on X.
Investors included Nvidia And Cisco Investments as well as long-time corporate backers Musk, Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX of Abu Dhabi and Baron Capital Group.
Nvidia and Cisco work with xAI as suppliers and strategic partners.
AI startups have reached dizzying valuations in 2025, raising massive sums of capital to fuel seemingly endless demand for their fundamental models. In October, OpenAI farm a $6.6 billion stock sale at a $500 billion valuation, and a month later Anthropic was estimated at around $350 billion, with capital coming from Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Musk’s AI company now owns and operates his social network merger with the company, formerly known as Twitter, in March.
The company is facing a new wave of regulatory investigations from authorities in Europe, India and Malaysia after its Grok chatbot generated sexualized images of children and non-consensual intimate images of adults, mostly women. Users shared the images widely on X.
Musk is focusing construction of xAI’s infrastructure in Memphis, Tennessee. Data centers, which use natural gas turbines as a power source, have attracted consternation many nearby residents because the emissions have contributed to air quality problems in the area, according to local researchers.
Despite its controversies, xAI reached an agreement with the Ministry of Defense, which recently added Grok to its AI agent platform. Grok is also the main chatbot for the Polymarket and Kalshi prediction betting platforms.
WATCH: xAI raises $20 billion
