SpaceX to buy AI coding startup Cursor for US$60 billion in enterprise push

Elon Musk’s SpaceX said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for US$60 billion, in a bid to ramp up its presence in the enterprise AI market.

The announcement comes just days after Musk took his rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and immediately made it one of the world’s most valuable companies.

SpaceX said it expects the merger to close during the third quarter of 2026.

SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months. The company said in April it had secured an option to either acquire San Francisco-based Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for their new partnership.

Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction.

Cursor’s business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, with roughly $2.6 billion in ​annualized business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month.

The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. It would also provide Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models.

In March, two product engineering heads at Cursor said they joined SpaceX to contribute to the company’s lunar projects and xAI.

It was not immediately clear if the deal would affect SpaceX’s agreements to rent out its data centers. The company has in recent weeks struck deals with Anthropic and Alphabet-owned Google to lease cloud computing capacity worth roughly $26 billion combined on an annual basis.

Both deals include 90-day termination clauses, meaning SpaceX could quickly reclaim computing capacity if needed.

Reporting by Deborah Sophia and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Sriraj Kalluvila, Reuters