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SpaceX has announced it holds the rights to acquire the AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year. The company, led by Elon Musk, is also considering an alternative $10 billion agreement to "work together" with the platform. These moves are part of a broader strategy to compete with AI rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic as SpaceX prepares for its upcoming debut on Wall Street.
SpaceX announced the deal Tuesday on the social platform X, which along with the AI chatbot Grok is part of a constellation of properties that Musk has merged into his rocket company.
Cursor, made by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX describes as Cursor’s wide “distribution to expert software engineers” is likely part of what makes it attractive to Musk’s company, giving it access to a new customer base.
Cursor said its new partnership with SpaceX subsidiary xAI will enable it to build future AI products using xAI’s massive AI data center complex Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.
“We’ve wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we’ve been bottlenecked by compute,” Cursor said in a statement on X, which didn’t mention the possibility of being acquired. “With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models.”
Cursor, which started in 2022, helped spark a trend called “vibe coding” as AI coding assistants have become increasingly capable of doing the work of computer programming.
Cursor competes with other coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex but also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology.
