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xAI in talks of raising $20 billion
Baidu upgrades ERNIE models
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xAI in talks of raising $20 billion
xAI
Elon Musk’s newly merged AI and social media company, XAI Holdings, is in talks to raise $20 billion, sources say. The deal, still in early stages, would value the company at over $120 billion and mark the second-largest AI raise ever after OpenAI’s $40 billion round.
The funds could help Musk chip away at the $13 billion debt load from taking Twitter private, now X. The company paid around $200 million in interest in March alone. Since combining xAI and X in March, Musk has quietly been pitching investors. The total raise could go even higher, depending on interest.
While Tesla stumbles, Musk’s private empire keeps growing—SpaceX hit $350 billion in private valuation last year. XAI aims to rival OpenAI, with fewer constraints and strong political backing. Musk remains a top Trump ally and has placed loyalists throughout Washington. Investors are betting he can turn that influence into yet another AI superpower.
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Baidu upgrades ERNIE models
Baidu
Baidu has launched ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo—upgrades to its foundation and reasoning models—just one month after their debut. CEO Robin Li announced the new versions during Baidu’s developer conference in Wuhan, touting “enhanced multimodal capabilities, strong reasoning, and low cost,” now available free via Ernie Bot. The company says ERNIE X1 performs on par with DeepSeek R1 at half the price, and that both models will be folded into Baidu’s broader ecosystem, including Baidu Search.
Li also revealed Baidu has activated a 30,000-chip supercomputing cluster powered by its homegrown Kunlun P800 processors. Analysts were unimpressed. “Turning on chips doesn’t mean much,” said Paul Smith-Goodson of Moor Insights. “US firms are training models with 100,000 GPUs—Kunlun chips can’t compete.” Thomas Randall at Info-Tech called Baidu strategically relevant but commercially weak in the West, citing geopolitical distrust and tech decoupling. “Baidu still matters,” he said, “but the innovation race isn’t US-only anymore.”
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