SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Assistant Cursor for $60 Billion

Just days after its blockbuster Nasdaq debut catapulted its valuation beyond $2 trillion, Elon Musk ‘s SpaceX is making another audacious bet, this time in artificial intelligence. The aerospace and technology giant said Tuesday it will acquire Anysphere, the company behind the fast-growing AI coding assistant Cursor, in a deal valued at $60 billion. The transaction, expected to close in the third quarter of 2026,is one of the largest acquisitions in the rapidly evolving AI software sector. It also shows SpaceX’ s ambitions to expand beyond rockets and satellite communications, deepening its footprint in enterprise artificial intelligence at a time when demand for AI-powered software tools is surging. The acquisition gives SpaceX direct ownership of one of the most popular AI coding platforms on the market. Cursor has emerged as a major player in the developer tools ecosystem, attracting programmers and businesses seeking to automate software development with generative AI. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup has experienced explosive growth. According to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month, Cursor has reached roughly $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue, with enterprise adoption accelerating sharply as companies increasingly integrate AI into their software workflows. For SpaceX, the deal offers a significant foothold in one of the most commercially successful segments of the AI industry. AI coding assistants have become an early revenue engine for the sector, with companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor competing to attract developers and enterprise customers. The acquisition follows months of discussions between the two companies. In April, SpaceX revealed it had secured an option that would allow it to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion to deepen an existing partnership. The agreement now appears to have culminated in a full takeover, bringing Cursor’s technology, talent and customer base under the SpaceX umbrella. The ties between the two firms have already been strengthening. In March, two of Cursor’s senior product engineering leaders announced they had joined SpaceX, where they began contributing to both the company’s lunar exploration initiatives and xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence venture. The deal is expected to strengthen the position of xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, which was merged with SpaceX in February. While Grok has gained visibility in the consumer AI market, xAI has yet to establish the same presence in AI-assisted software development as some of its rivals. By acquiring Cursor, SpaceX gains immediate access to a mature coding platform and a large community of developers. Cursor, meanwhile, could benefit from greater access to computing infrastructure and resources needed to train and deploy increasingly sophisticated AI models. Industry observers see the combination as potentially accelerating xAI’s efforts to compete more directly with established players in the AI coding space. One area that remains unclear is how the acquisition could affect SpaceX’s growing business of leasing data-center capacity. In recent weeks, the company signed agreements with Anthropic and Google, owned by Alphabet, to provide cloud computing capacity worth an estimated $26 billion annually. Those partnerships have helped position SpaceX as an increasingly important infrastructure provider for the AI industry. However, both contracts reportedly include 90-day termination provisions, giving SpaceX the flexibility to reclaim computing resources if internal demand rises following the Cursor acquisition.