SpaceX says it has the right to buy the artificial intelligence coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year as Elon Musk’s space exploration and AI company looks for ways to compete with rivals Anthropic and OpenAI ahead of a planned Wall Street debut.
SpaceX said it could alternatively pay $10 billion to “work together” with Cursor.
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 Any Sphere, 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 it also has relied heavily on partnerships with those larger AI research companies for the foundations of its technology.
It was Cursor’s Composer, combined with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, that a prominent AI researcher was playing with for weekend projects when he coined the phrase “vibe coding” in early 2025.
