SpaceX said on Tuesday that it is working with Cursor and has been granted the right to purchase the artificial intelligence coding startup later this year for $60 billion. In a social media statement, SpaceX added that it could instead pay $10 billion to establish a partnership with Cursor rather than exercise the acquisition option.
In its statement, SpaceX described the rationale for the tie-up: "The combination of Cursor's leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world's most useful models."
The announcement follows recent reporting that xAI - Elon Musk's AI venture that was folded into SpaceX - would provide computing capacity to Cursor, with Cursor training its most advanced models on xAI hardware. Last month, two senior engineering leaders left Cursor to join xAI, and separate reporting indicated Cursor was pursuing a private fundraising that would value the startup at about $50 billion. Cursor has been described as one of the fastest-growing platforms focused on AI coding.
Despite those signs of momentum, the statement and surrounding reports note that both Cursor and xAI trail competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic in producing advanced, in-house AI models. That gap in sophisticated model development is among the issues the SpaceX arrangement appears intended to address by pairing Cursor's product and developer distribution with large-scale training compute.
AI-assisted code generation has emerged as a prominent application area within the broader AI landscape, and the article noted Anthropic's recent activity releasing coding tools. At the same time, the potential acquisition represents a sizable financial commitment for SpaceX as it prepares for a major initial public offering later this year.
The company recently acquired Musk's xAI, and in the context of its IPO plans is reportedly targeting a valuation near $1.75 trillion while seeking to raise about $75 billion. The Cursor option or partnership would be a material expense against that backdrop.
Contextual note: Where reporting referenced external fundraising interest or personnel moves, those items were described in recent coverage and are reflected here as reported developments.