Nvidia in talks with Elon Musk about investing in xAI: source
Chipmaking giant Nvidia is in talks with Elon Musk about investing in his fast-growing artificial intelligence startup xAI, a source close to the situation said.
XAI — which powers the snarky Grok chatbot on Musk’s X social network — is in talks with some investors about raising several billion dollars at a roughly $40 billion valuation, the WSJ reported this week.
The Information reported he was talking to strategic investors — meaning tech companies as opposed to investment firms — but didn’t offer any names.
Venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Vy Capital have been included in the latest funding talks, the tech news site reported.
Nvidia — which under CEO Jensen Huang last week surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of more than $3.5 trillion — declined to comment when contacted by The Post.
The company had strongly denied similar rumors in the spring.
Musk is expecting in January to hold a major new fund-raising round that could value xAI at as much as $75 billion, two sources said.
It’s not unusual for chipmakers like Nvidia to co-invest with their customers on projects, according to industry insiders.
One Nvidia analyst who asked not to be named said xAI’s competitors would still buy Nvidia’s chips even if it invests in xAI.
“If not, this transaction would never go forward,” the analyst said.
In a December 2023 blog post, Nvidia said it had made investments in more than two dozen companies last year as the pace of innovation in AI and accelerated computing quickens.
“Nvidia’s corporate investments arm focuses on strategic collaborations,” Nvidia said in the blog post. “These partnerships stimulate joint innovation, enhance the Nvidia platform and expand the ecosystem.”
Some insiders say an xAI-Nvidia partnership would be a natural fit, given Musk’s extensive collaboration with Nvidia across his business empire.
In an Oct. 17 podcast, Huang praised Musk for building the fastest supercomputer on the planet with his company’s assistance in 19 days.
In April, Nvidia’s stock rose after Musk said Tesla would need access to more of Nvidia’s high-end chips to power the electric car maker’s AI plans, Barron’s reported.
Musk also said in April that xAI would need 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips to train the upgraded versions of its chatbot “Grok 3.”
The current version, Grok 2, took about 20,000 chips.
Musk was even quoted in a Nvidia press release following the release of its advanced Blackwell AI chips.
“There is currently nothing better than Nvidia hardware for AI,” Musk said in the release.
Musk’s xAI is a direct competitor to Google’s Gemini AI platform and OpenAI-backed ChatGPT.
