The LLM market has seen explosive growth, with nearly $12 billion raised in equity funding in 2023 alone. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere lead in terms of direct funding raised, companies like xAI are making significant investments in infrastructure. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are heavily involved through partnerships, direct investments, or developing their own LLM capabilities. NVIDIA plays a crucial role as a hardware provider, supplying the GPUs necessary for training these massive models.
OpenAI:
- Total funding: Over $14 billion
- Received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft in January 2023
- Accounts for over 80% of total capital raised in the LLM developer space
Anthropic:
- Total funding: $7.7 billion
- Received up to $4 billion strategic investment from Amazon
- Also backed by Google and Salesforce Ventures
Cohere:
- Total funding: $435 million
- Secured a $270 million Series C round in May 2023
xAI (Elon Musk’s company developing Grok):
- Exact funding unclear, but significant investment in infrastructure
- Partnered with Dell and NVIDIA to build an “AI factory” for training Grok
- Established a supercomputing center in Memphis with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs
- Estimated hardware cost: $3-4 billion if purchased outright (may be rented)
Microsoft:
- Major investor in OpenAI ($10 billion partnership)
- Developing its own LLM capabilities
Google:
- Investing heavily in its own LLM development (e.g., Gemini)
- Has also invested hundreds of millions in Anthropic
Meta (Facebook):
- Funding its own LLM development, including open-source models like Llama 2
- Plans to have about 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs by the end of 2024
Amazon:
- Major investor in Anthropic (up to $4 billion commitment)
NVIDIA:
- Not directly developing LLMs, but a crucial hardware provider
- Partnered with Dell to support xAI’s Grok development
- Supplying GPUs (especially H100s) to many major AI companies