The collaboration between SpaceX and AI startup Cursor has resulted in an acquisition. The companies have agreed to a buyout for 60 billion dollars.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, has announced the acquisition of Cursor, a startup specializing in AI-driven programming tools. This agreement is part of Musk’s broader strategy to expand his AI operations. The news comes as no surprise: in April, both companies had already entered into an agreement regarding AI model training.
That agreement already included the option for an acquisition. SpaceX is paying sixty billion dollars in shares.
Computing power from space
Since SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI, the aerospace company has focused on expanding its computing infrastructure. This includes exploring the development of space-based data centers for commercial purposes. To further bolster this computing power, Musk set his sights on a collaboration with the coding company Cursor.
“We wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we were held back by compute. With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to drastically scale the intelligence of our models,” Cursor stated in an announcement in April. This refers to Cursor’s Composer model, the AI coding model released less than six months ago.
Acquisition following IPO
SpaceX is exercising the option to acquire Cursor for 60 billion dollars, reports the Wall Street Journal. These days, that is a mere pittance for Elon Musk. The acquisition follows shortly after SpaceX’s multi-billion dollar IPO, which is shattering records on Wall Street. With a market value of 2.75 trillion dollars, SpaceX has even overtaken Amazon as the fifth most valuable company in the world. Even without an acquisition, SpaceX would have paid ten billion dollars to continue working with Cursor.
The AI battle continues, and SpaceX wants to involve itself ever more explicitly. With this move, Musk aims to further build his AI powerhouse, but other AI companies are also picking up the pace. For instance, Anthropic is focusing heavily on the expansion of Claude Code, and OpenAI recently acquired Astral to strengthen its coding assistant, Codex. Anthropic and OpenAI are also eyeing the stock market.
This article originally appeared on April 22 and has been updated with the latest information.