SpaceX announced Tuesday that it has struck a deal with Cursor that would give it the right to buy the coding startup for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for the work it’s doing if there’s no acquisition.
The partnership with Cursor gives Elon Musk’s space company a major foothold in the AI coding race. Cursor gets access to SpaceX’s computing resources, including Colossus, a supercomputer powered by 200,000 Nvidia GPUs.
“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,” SpaceX said in a statement posted on X. “Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.”
Cursor co-founder Michael Truell said in an X post: “Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer. A meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI.”
SpaceX’s partnership with Cursor comes at a pivotal moment for the company. In February, it acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup, broadening the rocket company’s scope into AI infrastructure and software. Then in early April, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO, setting the stage for a potential public debut for later this year.
Buying Cursor would position SpaceX to compete more directly with frontier AI labs like Anthropic amid a heated race for more capable coding tools and AI agents.
XAI recently underwent shifts in its leadership structure as a slew of high-profile employees , including Musk’s 11 original cofounders, left the startup. Musk said at a conference that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, “is currently behind in coding.”
Last week, Business Insider reported that xAI was planning to provide Cursor with computing power, according to sources familiar with the matter.
