xAI just closed a monster Series E funding round, pulling in $20 billion and blowing past its original $15 billion target. The round was heavily oversubscribed, drawing backing from some serious players: Valor, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, NVIDIA, and Cisco all got in on the action.

The capital is earmarked to ramp up construction of Colossus I and Colossus II—massive supercomputer facilities designed to handle the computational demands of advanced AI workloads. Here's the scale we're talking about: the infrastructure now commands over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents, a staggering amount of processing power that underscores the arms race in AI compute hardware. This move signals how much momentum is building around specialized infrastructure for next-gen AI systems, with institutional capital clearly betting big on the buildout.