SpaceX secures option to buy AI startup Cursor for $60bn or partner for $10bn | Technology
SpaceX said it has secured the option to buy code-generation startup Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for its new partnerships, as it moves deeper into the lucrative market for AI developer tools.
Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups, along with OpenAI and Anthropic, that are attracting waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, a task where AI companies are finding early commercial traction.
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 behind rivals. It also gives Cursor more computing capacity to develop AI models.
“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 usable models,” SpaceX said. social media post on Tuesday.
Colossus is the supercomputer cluster in Memphis that xAI touts as the largest in the world. The company is spending billions of dollars on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The announcement comes ahead of SpaceX’s highly anticipated public launch in the coming months; The company is aiming to raise a $75 billion fund at a valuation near $1.75 trillion and what could go down as the largest IPO in history.
Two heads of product engineering at Cursor, a startup that sells artificial intelligence models for coding tasks, said in March that they joined SpaceX to contribute to the company’s moon projects and Musk’s artificial intelligence initiative xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.
Musk welcomed engineers Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg and said: “Orbital spaceports and mass drives on the Moon are going to be incredible.”
