Elon Musk's xAI raises 20 billion USD! Nvidia also invests, and X and Grok reach 600 million monthly active users

xAI completes $20 billion funding, with Nvidia participating, significantly boosting valuation. The funds will be used to train Grok 5, but currently face regulatory investigations in multiple countries due to AI image editing involving deepfake exploitation chaos.

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $20 billion, with Nvidia also investing

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI announced today (1/7) Taiwan time that it has completed Series E funding, raising a total of $20 billion, surpassing the original goal of $15 billion and significantly increasing its valuation.

The investor lineup is extensive, including Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, and MGX, among others. Tech giants Nvidia and Cisco also participated as “strategic investors.”

Although xAI did not disclose whether these investments are equity or debt, the company confirmed that the combined monthly active users of the X platform and Grok have reached approximately 600 million, and this funding will be used to expand data centers and model development.

Image source: xAI xAI completes $20 billion fundraising, Nvidia also invests

xAI partners with Nvidia to expand computing power and fully train Grok 5

Regarding the strategic partnership with Nvidia and Cisco, xAI stated that these partners will help the company rapidly expand computing infrastructure to build the world’s largest GPU cluster. xAI is leveraging its expanded data center footprint to fully train the next-generation model Grok 5.

Looking back at 2025, xAI claims to have pushed reinforcement learning training to new heights, and has improved Grok’s reasoning ability through the Colossus supercomputer, with an equivalent capacity of over one million H100 GPUs. It has also launched voice and image generation products such as Grok Voice and Grok Imagine.

xAI revealed that the new funds will be used to accelerate AI product development and deployment, as well as fund core research, aiming to narrow the gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI models. The goal is to apply the technology to the lives and work of billions of users.

Image source: Getty Images xAI partners with Nvidia to expand computing power and fully train Grok 5

Elon Musk also wants Grok 5 to challenge the strongest esports team in “League of Legends” (LOL), and South Korea’s T1 has responded by accepting the challenge.

Related reading:
Elon Musk sets two major restrictions for Grok 5, previews challenge to the strongest human LOL esports team, T1: has accepted

Grok image editing chaos sparks regulatory investigations in multiple countries

However, at the same time as the funding news was announced, xAI is facing serious misuse controversy.

“Crypto City” reported yesterday that since the X platform introduced Grok’s image editing and comment call features, malicious individuals have begun extensively modifying others’ real photos without permission, creating deepfake sexual exploitation images, and even child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

In response to the misuse chaos of Grok image editing, many netizens have begun submitting complaints and reports. Currently, regulatory agencies in the EU, UK, India, Malaysia, and France have intervened and launched investigations into the X platform and Grok.

Although X later responded that it would delete violating content, block accounts, and assist law enforcement when necessary, this incident has already damaged its safety reputation.

Related reading:
Shocking! X CEO suddenly resigns, Grok sparks racial controversy, triggering top-level turmoil?