A (0:01)

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B (0:30)

Are you really buying a car online on AutoTrader right now?

C (0:33)

Really?

B (0:34)

At a playground?

C (0:35)

Yeah. Really? Look at these listings from dealers.

B (0:37)

Wow, your search can really get that specific.

C (0:40)

Really?

B (0:40)

And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget.

C (0:44)

Mom needs a second, honey.

B (0:45)

You can really have it delivered.

C (0:47)

Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car.

D (0:52)

Mommy.

B (0:53)

I think your kid is walking up the slide again.

C (0:56)

Really? Auto trader. Buy your car online. Really?

D (1:00)

Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show we are talking about some insane amounts of money that have been raised by Anthropic and Xai. Anthropic is looking at a $350 billion valuation in their most. In their latest raise that they're working towards, they're trying to raise $10 billion and Xai has just announced they have closed a $20 billion mega round. There is a lot to unpack in the world of a AI and these absolutely astronomical valuations and rounds of funding. Today on the podcast we're gonna be breaking down these deals, where the money is coming from, where it's going and why it is being raised. But before we get into that, if you wanna try all of the AI models I talk about here, whether that's everything from Anthropic, everything from xai, like Grok, tons of really cool audio generation models, everything from OpenAI image generation models, all for $20 a month. Go check out my startup which is called AI Box AI. I'll leave a link in the description to it, but I hope that it saves you money so you don't have to have subscriptions to a hundred different AI platforms there. 40 of the top AI models, Google, Gemini, there's everything on there. So go check it out. AI Box AI. All right, let's talk about these absolutely astronomical rounds of funding that are being raised by some of the biggest AI labs in the country. I think capital is really continuing to flood the top tier AI labs, right? It's not every AI company That's raising a lot of money, but the top tier ones are sucking up a lot of it. I think people feel like there's kind of this kingmaker strategy. These big labs are kind of found really strong product market fit and if you can bet on them, they will continue to grow. Anthropic and Xai are both moving to lock in massive new rounds that I think show just how quickly valuations in AI are climbing. Anthropic is prepared to raise roughly $10 billion. They're looking to do this at a $350 billion valuation. This is according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. And so, I mean, this is a massive round. Of course, when, when this is just leaked and it's just speculative and they're looking to do it and it's a quote unquote person familiar with the matter. I think like from the Wall Street Journal seems pretty credible, reputable and on par with what Anthropic has been doing in the past. If they complete that, this financing round is going to nearly double Anthropic's valuation from just three months ago. It's crazy to me. You know, a lot of these companies in AI are, they're raising money and, or in the past it would be like every two years you'd go raise a new round of funding. We're seeing every three months they're raising funding. And it's not like it's incrementally growing the company. I mean, we're almost doubling the valuation of the company from two months ago or from three months. Because when Anthropic last raised around it was at a $13 billion. That was their series F, they raised $13 billion and it was at $183 billion valuation. So they're jumping from 183 to 350. They're raising 10 billion. So you know, they're taking in less money. They're getting 10 instead of 13, but the valuation's going up, so they're giving up less equity, diluting less. I think the other important thing to remember is like it hasn't been that long since Anthropic just last year in March was raising $3.5 billion and it was a $61 billion valuation. In less than a year, we've gone from $61 billion valuation to 350 billion valuation. I mean, these things are just growing so fast. It's absolutely incredible. Investors are pricing these labs. How they're able to do that is definitely a challenge. But they continue to grow and people continue to Invest in them. And so obviously I think investors see a ton of upside in this. The latest round is expected to be led by CO2 management and GIC, which is Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. It's interesting, we're seeing more of these kind of sovereign wealth fund invest into these kind of huge rounds by these AI companies. Last one, Anthropic kind of was famous for complaining that they had to take money from authoritarian regimes like Qatar. Who was a significant investor in their last financing round, it was the Qatar Investment Authority. It's kind of funny because they're taking their money while also complaining that they don't agree with the company or the country. It was just kind of a strange, a strange comment from their CEO at the time of that. But anyways, we're seeing more and more of these kind of sovereign wealth funds get into these rounds because these are the only people that have these like absolutely astronomical amounts of money that these AI labs need to continue to grow. So Anthropic is reportedly aiming to close this deal in the coming weeks, although the final amount could still change whether that's how much they generate. I mean we've seen some of these deals where it's like, oh, they're looking to get, you know, $10 billion and they end up getting 15. So like these things can change. This financing round is going to be separate from the $15 commitment that was recently announced by Nvidia and Microsoft. A deal that is going to see Anthropic pur as much as $30 billion in compute capacity from Microsoft Azure to power some of the Nvidia chips that they're using for their AI systems. And that arrangement I think has been really widely described as, you know, it's obviously circular, effectively tying investment capital directly to long term infrastructure spending. So Microsoft and Nvidia are going to give them $30 billion and they're going to give that $30 billion right back to Microsoft and Nvidia for compute and for chips and stuff. So that's a little bit more circular. Some of this money they can actually use and research and other things. So I think this new round of capital is coming as Anthropic has continued to build a lot of momentum with developers, particularly around Claude Code, something that we use at AI Box exclusively and see absolutely insane. You know, the amount of code and features and tools and things we're able to build with it for AI Box is amazing. So I think this is a massive tool that everyone is falling in love with. It's basically their AI power Coding tool. It's built into, it's built on top of Claude Opus 4. 5 and it's is also. This latest round is also coming as Anthropic is positioning themselves for a potential IPO later this year. So when you're asking, you know, why are all these people dumping so much money in three months apart, I think it's because they can see that Anthropic is, you know, rapidly growing. There's basically an. They basically have a massive demand. They have to rate limit people from using Claude code. And so they have this massive demand for some of their tools and they're like, look, if we could just get more compute and we could just get more money and just get more chips, we could let more people use our products and we will make more money. Because I know even at AI box, we get rate limited and it drives us crazy from, you know, what we're trying to develop. So there's a massive demand, more than they can fill from their users. So I think they're going to pull in some of this money to try to help feed that demand, get more money. And of course they're going to IPO later this year. Allegedly. This is kind of the direction and perhaps they'll do this alongside OpenAI, which is separately in talks to raise $100 billion at a valuation reportedly getting close to 830 billion. These companies are just kind of neck and neck and growing very, very quickly. So I think while Anthropic valuation surge is kind of reflecting investor confidence in its models and its enterprise traction, Anthropic kind of has a unique angle there where a lot of companies use it, a lot of developers use it. So it kind of has like a developer can, can use $200 in a day if they're really going crazy with it, whereas OpenAI has way more users, but they're usually 20 bucks a month. So there's different units of economics here. And I think investors are excited about Anthropics. They're kind of focused on enterprise, a lot of the traction they've seen there. But I think it also underscores the huge amount of capital needed to compete for these frontier AI developments. Okay, so Anthropic, doing big things, raising a lot of money. But they are not the only player that is raising money. Another major player following a really similar path is xai. This is founded by Elon Musk. It's kind of the parent company of Grok, the ChatGPT competitor. It's built into X. They just announced that they have raised $20 billion in a series E. They said this in a blog post that the financing comes with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, which is exactly who also invested in Anthropic's last round of funding. They said that there are others along with Nvidia and Cisco who are strategic investors. They didn't disclose whether the new capital was raised through equity, debt or combination of those two. They said that they have now reached 600 million monthly active users across X and it's Grok Chatbot because XAI actually acquired X. So now they can kind of like pull the data and the analytics in to that. They are planning to use the funding to continuing expanding their data center footprint and to further develop Groq's underlying models. I think taken together these two financing rounds really highlight from Anthropic and from XAI just how much the AI race is defined by scale. Right? Model training, inference, deployment. Demand is getting, you know, is ever growing. It's kind of this ever, ever larger infrastructure investments that we keep seeing. And I think the companies that are leading the space are raising capital at levels that was really once only reserved for the largest public technology companies. And these are all private companies, which is just absolutely crazy. I think for now a lot of investors appear to be willing to keep writing checks. They're betting that, you know, a small number of AI labs are going to ultimately dominate both the technology and the economics of the next computing platform. And so that's why we see so much money kind of just all pooling up around OpenAI and anthropic and XAI and, and even Google. And so a lot of the biggest players are just pulling in all of the money. And so it'll be interesting to see if they can continue to dominate, if they'll be breakout players from smaller startups and what will happen with all of that. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode. If you learned anything new, it would really honestly be an amazing blessing in my life if you could leave a review on the podcast. It helps the show a ton to get found by more amazing people like yourself. And as always, make sure to go check out AI box AI if you want to try all of the latest AI models in one place for $20 a month, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.