SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — SpaceX said it has the rights to buy 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 its planned Wall Street debut.
SpaceX said it could pay $10 billion to “work” with Cursor in return.
SpaceX announced the deal on social platform X on Tuesday. X, along with the AI chatbot Grok, are part of a suite of assets that Musk has integrated into his rocket company.
Cursor, developed by San Francisco startup Anysphere, is a popular AI coding assistant. What SpaceX describes as Cursor’s broad “distribution to professional software engineers” is likely part of what makes Cursor attractive to Musk’s company and allows it to access a new customer base.
Cursor said the new partnership with xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary, will allow SpaceX to build future AI products using xAI’s large-scale AI data center complex, Colossus, based in Memphis, Tennessee.
“We wanted to further our training efforts, but computing was a bottleneck,” Cursor said in a statement about X, without discussing the possibility of an acquisition. “With this partnership, our team will leverage xAI’s Colossus infrastructure to dramatically scale up the intelligence of our models.”
Launched in 2022, Cursor sparked a trend known as “vibe coding” as AI coding assistants become increasingly capable of computer programming tasks.
Although Cursor competes with other coding tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, it also relies heavily on partnerships with these leading AI research companies for its technology foundations.
When a prominent AI researcher coined the term “vibe coding” in early 2025, he was playing around with a weekend project that combined Cursor’s Composer and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet.
