According to a Bloomberg report, his company xAI is currently burning through nearly a billion dollars a month to try to catch up with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. A colossal capital outflow that speaks volumes about the billionaire's ambitions.
$13 billion by 2025
Founded in 2023, xAI is anything but a small, experimental structure, as the company has built up extraordinary resources since its first few months of existence. The “Colossus” project, currently being deployed, includes the construction of a mega data center capable of hosting more than 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, with the ambition of eventually reaching one million GPUs. It is one of the most ambitious AI infrastructures in the world to date.
Behind these dizzying figures, one obsession: to get back in the race. Elon Musk, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI before leaving in 2018, has often expressed his doubts about the direction taken by his former company. Since then, he has multiplied his criticisms… while simultaneously building his own AI ecosystem integrated into X (formerly Twitter), Tesla, and soon his other companies.
According to internal documents cited by Bloomberg, total planned spending for xAI in 2025 would reach $13 billion, compared to revenues estimated at only $500 million. A disproportion that raises eyebrows in certain investor circles, but which Musk seems to accept.
The fundraising currently underway, worth $9.3 billion, includes both debt and equity investments. In other words, Elon Musk is selling a vision: that of a future dominated by his own AI model, integrated into his social platforms, his vehicles, and perhaps one day his Optimus humanoid robots.
Musk denies it... but without convincingly
Faced with the media coverage of the figure, one billion dollars per month, Elon Musk quickly reacted on his X platform, calling the revelations "nonsense," without providing any counter-arguments in figures. A silence that, for many observers, rather reinforces the elements put forward by Bloomberg.
It must be said that Musk has never hidden his appetite for risky bets. Whether with Tesla in its early days, or more recently with the controversial acquisition of Twitter, its industrial bets are often seen as bluffs... until they work.
Despite the dizzying sums, xAI's strategy is part of a well-known logic in Silicon Valley: investing massively in infrastructure before the technology becomes essential. This is what Amazon did with AWS, or Nvidia with its GPUs. With this in mind, xAI could well establish itself in the long term... provided it delivers a truly competitive product.
To date, its main product, the Grok chatbot, remains behind GPT or Claude models. While it has been natively integrated into X, its performance remains limited and its adoption marginal. But with an army of GPUs in training and billions ready to be injected into the machine, the landscape could change quickly.
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