Until now, xAI has been playing catch-up to AI giants like OpenAI. But Trump’s return to the White House changes everything. With Musk’s deep ties to the new administration, xAI could soon leapfrog its rivals to become the dominant player in the AI space.

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round in December. The company announced that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD, and others participated.

The new cash brings xAI’s total raised to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion tranche xAI raised in May.

Elon Musk spent the past year building his artificial intelligence startup xAI at breakneck speed. Soon after, the company released Grok, a flagship generative AI model that now powers a number of features on X, including a chatbot accessible to X Premium subscribers and free users in some regions.

Grok has what Musk has described as “a rebellious streak” — a willingness to answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” Told to be vulgar, for example, Grok will happily oblige, spewing profanities and colorful language you won’t hear from ChatGPT.

Over the past year, Grok has become increasingly ingrained in X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. At launch, Grok was only available to X users — and developers skilled enough to get the “open source” edition up and running.

xAI is sprinting to catch up to formidable competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in the generative AI race. The company launched an API in October, allowing customers to build Grok into third-party apps, platforms, and services. And it just rolled out a standalone Grok iOS app to a test audience.

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Musk said this summer that xAI is training the next generation of Grok models at its Memphis data center, which was apparently built in just 122 days and is currently powered partly by portable diesel generators. The company hopes to upgrade the server farm, which contains 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, next year; in a press release, xAI said it plans to fully double that number. (Because of their ability to perform many calculations in parallel, GPUs are the favored chips for training and running models.)

Tesla is also expected to use the upgraded data center to improve its autonomous driving technologies.

So the main question here is how to find a backdoor investment opportunity to ride this wave of innovation. Nvidia, X, Tesla are already on the pick up list. Who are xAI’s and/or Memphis data center’s next silent partners? Ideas?