The artificial intelligence company xAI, founded by Elon Musk, raised $6bn  in a round of financing on Monday evening to "accelerate its development." The money will be used to strengthen its infrastructure and increase the power of its Colossus supercomputer which is designed to train advanced models such as Grok. Grok 2, available for free on X and generates text and images from simple user requests.

Funding has been raised from major investors including Nvidia, AMD, BlackRock, Sequoia Capital and Morgan Stanley. The main objective is to double the number of Colossus graphics chips, from 100,000 to 200,000, in order to better compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. xAI is said to be worth around $50 billion. That's around three times less than its rival.

This fundraising comes at a time when competition in the field of artificial intelligence is intensifying, with players such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta all investing massively to dominate this fast-growing sector.