xAI has closed an upsized $20 billion Series E funding round, exceeding its original $15 billion target, with participation from the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, as Gulf sovereign capital continues to concentrate around large-scale AI infrastructure.
Other participants in the round include Valor Equity Partners, StepStone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Baron Capital Group. Strategic investors NVIDIA and Cisco Investments also joined the round, with capital earmarked primarily for compute expansion and next-generation model training.
The Series E follows a pattern of sustained follow-on investment by QIA, which has emerged as one of xAI’s most consistent backers. QIA first entered xAI’s cap table in November 2024 during the company’s $6 billion Series C round, which valued xAI at approximately $50 billion. That round coincided with the early expansion of xAI’s Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis, where funding was directed toward large-scale NVIDIA H100 GPU procurement.
The company did not disclose the debt versus equity breakdown, but previous reporting suggests that upwards of $12 billion of the $20 billion could be debt financing.
By the end of 2025, xAI reported operating more than one million H100 GPU-equivalent units across its Colossus I and II data centres, making it one of the largest AI compute operators globally. The Series E capital is expected to support the training of Grok 5, as well as continued expansion of xAI’s data centre footprint.
Gulf sovereign funds are increasingly backing competing frontier labs. MGX has become deeply embedded in the OpenAI ecosystem, participating in OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round in October 2024 alongside Microsoft, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, and acting as a strategic partner in the $100 billion Stargate supercomputer initiative announced in early 2025. That project aims to build massive U.S.-based compute clusters to support OpenAI’s long-term training roadmap. MGX has also been reported to have increased its exposure via secondary market purchases, further strengthening its position.
By contrast, MGX does not appear on the cap table of Anthropic. While talks were held in late 2025 during a Middle East tour by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, MGX was absent when Anthropic closed its Series F round later that year. Instead, QIA emerged as Anthropic’s primary Gulf backer, effectively anchoring Qatar’s exposure to a rival frontier lab.
This has resulted in a clear split in sovereign AI strategy across the region. Abu Dhabi, through MGX, has aligned itself closely with OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, while Qatar, via QIA, has backed Anthropic and maintained a parallel position in xAI. The result is not a single regional AI bet, but a portfolio approach that mirrors the global competition between frontier model developers.
It should be mentioned that xAI’s Gulf alignment extends beyond solely capital. In November 2025, Elon Musk announced plans to build a 500-megawatt data centre in Saudi Arabia, developed in partnership with HUMAIN AI, a company backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The facility will run on NVIDIA chips and would exceed the capacity of xAI’s Colossus I site in Memphis, which operates at roughly 300 megawatts. If completed, it would represent one of the largest AI infrastructure projects announced in the region to date.
