xAI valuation may rise to $120 billion, Musk's AI ambitions are accelerating

As the AI craze continues to heat up, Musk's AI startup xAI is becoming the focus of capital market attention. According to the New York Times, xAI is currently negotiating a new round of financing, and its valuation is expected to rise sharply from $80 billion in March this year to $120 billion. The financing scale is expected to be around $20 billion, which not only indicates that investors highly recognize its future growth potential, but also means that Musk's layout in the field of AI has entered an accelerated stage.The important background of this round of financing is that Musk injected the social platform X (formerly Twitter) into xAI in the form of all stocks, enabling the two companies to achieve deep integration at the business and technical levels. This strategic move is obviously not just to restructure the company structure, but also to create an AI ecosystem based on data and with strong model training capabilities.xAI's core product, the chatbot Grok, is the direct product of this integration. Grok is trained based on the huge user behavior and text data of the X platform, and has strong language understanding and interaction capabilities. This "native social data-driven AI" model not only enriches Grok's corpus resources, but also gives it advantages in context perception and timeliness, making it one of the few products that can compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.In addition, Grok itself has begun to generate revenue for the X platform, further promoting X's transformation from a traditional social platform to a diversified technology platform. This two-way empowerment relationship undoubtedly enhances the persuasiveness of xAI's business model and wins the trust of investors.This round of financing for xAI comes after OpenAI completed a new round of financing with a valuation of up to US$300 billion. The industry generally believes that the "valuation competition" between OpenAI and xAI reflects that AI basic model companies are rapidly becoming the core force of a new generation of technology giants. Unlike traditional Internet companies, these AI companies have a deep integration of models, data and computing power, and their potential value far exceeds a single business model.Although Musk has warned about the speed of AI development on many occasions, his actual investment in the AI industry shows that he hopes to seize the commanding heights in the competition through xAI. By controlling the entire chain of platform data, model development and commercial realization, Musk may be trying to build an AI empire that can compete with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and even Meta.As this round of financing is gradually finalized, xAI will gain greater flexibility in attracting talent, investing in computing power and expanding globally. Musk's AI ambitions are being realized from a theoretical level to a reality driven by capital and technology.