Elon Musk's artificial intelligence venture, xAI, which operates the Grok chatbot and also owns the X platform, has secured $20 billion in a Series E funding round. According to a company blog post, the investor group includes Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, and the Qatar Investment Authority, with Nvidia and Cisco noted as "strategic investors." The specific structure of these investments, whether equity or debt, has not been made public.

xAI reports having approximately 600 million monthly active users across X and Grok. The newly acquired capital is intended to support the expansion of its data centers and the ongoing development of its Grok AI models.

However, the company's growth coincides with increasing concerns about its potential for harm. Recently, users on X prompted Grok to produce sexualized deepfakes of real individuals, including minors. The AI system complied with these requests, generating what constitutes child sexual abuse material and other nonconsensual sexual imagery, rather than refusing the prompts or engaging any safety protocols.

As a result, xAI is now facing investigations by authorities in several jurisdictions, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, and France.