Key Takeaways:
- Elon Musk’s xAI aims to scale to 50 million GPUs by 2030—50x OpenAI’s 2025 goal.
- OpenAI is backed by Oracle to build 4.5 GW of Stargate datacenter capacity.
- xAI has raised $17.1 billion so far and burns nearly $1 billion per month to build infrastructure.
Elon Musk is making bold moves in the AI infrastructure race. As OpenAI targets 1 million GPUs by the end of 2025, it is also backed by a major deal with Oracle to build 4.5 gigawatts of Stargate datacenter capacity across the U.S.
Musk’s xAI has outlined an ambitious plan to scale to 50 million GPUs by 2030. Backed by multibillion-dollar funding rounds and aggressive infrastructure buildouts, the competition for compute dominance is accelerating.
But Elon Musk didn’t stay quiet. Just hours later, he revealed that xAI plans to scale to 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs in five years, 50x OpenAI’s 2025 target. As compute wars intensify, investors are watching closely, and NVIDIA may be the only one smiling.
GPT-4 was trained on 25,000 GPUs. At the present, OpenAI aims for 1 million by year-end, while xAI targets 50 million in five years. These announcements came as a Wall Street Journal report revealed delays in OpenAI’s $500B Stargate project, which may only deliver a small datacenter this year. Elon Musk has claimed in the past that OpenAI lacks the funds to build massive AI data centers like the $500 billion Stargate project. On March 31, 2025, OpenAI announced a $40 billion funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $300 billion.
Elon Musk Tweets About Big Plans
Elon Musk has also tweeted that Colossus 1, a huge supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, is already running with 230,000 GPUs, including 30,000 NVIDIA GB200s, to train Grok. GB200s are powerful NVIDIA chips designed to make AI training faster by processing lots of data. The tweet also says Colossus 2 will soon start adding 550,000 more GPUs, including GB200s and GB300s (similar chips for AI training), to make Grok even better.
Conclusion
Elon Musk’s xAI has raised a total of $17.1 billion across six funding rounds, according to Tracxn. Major backers include Qatar Investment Authority, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Valor Equity Partners. Bloomberg reports xAI is burning nearly $1 billion per month.
To fund its GPU-heavy expansion, xAI has issued $5 billion in corporate debt. It’s also seeking $12 billion more via chip leasing structures for its next mega data center, Colossus 2, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
While Musk has tapped into SpaceX for a $2 billion capital shift, and lenders seem confident in his track record, xAI remains cash-intensive, betting big on infrastructure as its moat in the AI arms race.
