AI startup xAI has raised an upsized $20 billion in a Series E funding round, as per an official press release on January 6, 2026.
The round was initially targeting a funding amount of $15 million, but got upsized on the back of high investor capital. According to CNBC, xAI now has an implied valuation of $230 billion. Prior to the round, estimates pegged the firm’s valuation to be anywhere between $170 to $200 billion.
Momentum for AI funding remains strong, with this being the first multi-billion-dollar funding round of 2026, comparable to some of the funding rounds seen in 2025 in terms of value.
Some of the largest rounds last year included OpenAI’s $40 billion funding, backed by investment firm SoftBank Corp, and Anthropic’s $13 billion Series F in September 2025.
Earlier reports suggested the startup had raised a total of $15 billion in November 2025. This was denied by Elon Musk.
xAI is one of the many startups managed by Elon Musk. The company is known for its AI assistant called Grok, which has been integrated across X—now a prominent right-wing-leaning social media platform that was acquired by Musk in 2022.
Prominent investors in this round included Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group.
NVIDIA and Cisco Investments were named as strategic investors for the round. NVIDIA has previously supported xAI in its Series C funding round in 2024—which saw $6 million raised—alongside chipmaking firm AMD as strategic investors.
With another show of financial support, one of Silicon Valley’s most valued chipmaking firms shows continued interest in the future of xAI.
Similar to the rest of the industry, xAI has opted to turn to venture capital for funds instead of an IPO, for which no concrete plans have been announced as of yet.
The official update by xAI stated that the previous year was one of multiple breakthroughs— due to which the company now operates in multiple verticals such as data centers, LLMS, and voice assistance powered by AI.
xAI gets huge exposure to users numbered in the hundreds of millions through X, which has millions of users trying out its AI chatbot called Grok. Apart from the LLM, Grok Voice and Grok Imagine are other popular features used for voice assistance and multi-modal image and voice generation.
The money raised is expected to be used towards building more infrastructure in the AI race, creating more compute, and further developing its AI models.