SpaceX Collaborates With Cursor & Has A $60B Acquisition Option

A recent publication shows that SpaceX announced that it has reached a strategic agreement with Anysphere-owned AI coding startup Cursor to create a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI,” which includes an unexpected clause: the opportunity to purchase the well-known software development platform for $60 billion later this year, which will be exercised later in 2026.

Under the agreement, SpaceX has a $60 billion option to acquire Cursor outright or, if the acquisition does not occur, a committed $10 billion partnership path for joint development, all aimed at building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.”

Only in the context of SpaceX’s much-awaited IPO is it possible to collaborate with and even buy a leader in the most popular AI product category. Its involvement with Cursor may be viewed by investors looking for additional value in the IPO as a means of extracting profit from Elon Musk’s expanding tech empire.

Those who keep a close eye on the industry won’t be surprised by the deal. It was revealed last week that Cursor, a coding startup, will start renting processing capacity from xAI’s data centers. Cursor would use tens of thousands of xAI chips to train its most recent AI model. Additionally, two of Cursor’s top engineering executives, Jason Ginsberg and Andrew Milich, departed the firm last month to join xAI, where they both answer directly to Musk.

The collaboration, according to SpaceX, is a project that combines Cursor’s “product and distribution to expert software engineers” with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, which it claims has the computational capacity of a million Nvidia H100 chips. 

In addition, SpaceX stated that it will either pay Cursor $10 billion for its labour or buy the business for $60 billion at an unspecified time later this year. A press team and agency had revealed last week that Cursor was considering a $50 billion valuation in a future round of private investment. The figure itself shows an incredible sequence of leaps. When Cursor closed on $2.3 billion in Series D investment in November of last year, its post-money valuation was $29.3 billion. In January of last year, its valuation was only $2.5 billion. By May of that same year, it had risen to $9 billion.

For SpaceX, which is anticipating a large capital investment and is often perceived as losing money after acquiring xAI and the social media network X, any amount would be a substantial expense. The brief statement did not specify if SpaceX stock might be used to settle either deal.

Meanwhile, the action may strengthen each company’s shortcomings, but it also highlights them. The top products from Anthropic and OpenAI, which are now directly competing with Cursor for the developer market, are superior to both Cursor’s and xAI’s proprietary models. 

Even as both companies release their own coding tools, Cursor continues to use and sell access to Claude and GPT models; this awkward situation may be intended to eventually be broken by this new SpaceX partnership. 

Further context to why the $60B valuation is that Cursor’s value jumped from $2.5B in early 2025 to over $50B by April 2026. It hit $2B in annualized revenue by February 2026 and expects $6B+ by year-end. The acquisition is seen as a strategic move to boost SpaceX’s AI credentials ahead of its planned $1.75T IPO in June 2026.

This move follows the February 2026 merger of Elon Musk’s xAI into SpaceX, Cursor’s integration grants it access to the Colossus supercomputer (featuring roughly one million Nvidia H100-equivalent chips) to scale its intelligence and reduce reliance on models from rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, especially after senior Cursor engineers had already moved to xAI to work directly under Musk.