What’s Behind SpaceX's US$60bn Cursor Acquisition?

After its groundbreaking Nasdaq debut, SpaceX is using its newfound financial power to buy into the enterprise AI market.

Elon Musk’s aerospace company is acquiring Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for US$60bn. 

SpaceX expects the merger to close during the autumn of 2026, with the transaction completed by the end of September. The acquisition will see Cursor’s shareholders paid entirely with US$60bn worth of SpaceX shares. –

The development comes just days after the company joined the Nasdaq stock exchange, valuing it at more than US$2tn following a blockbuster IPO. 

This has also helped it achieve a top spot among the world’s most valuable businesses, overtaking Amazon to become the world's fifth-largest company by market capitalisation. 

Cursor acquisition to accelerate xAI growth

SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months before making the definitive agreement. The company announced in April that it had secured an option to either acquire the San Francisco-based firm for US$60bn later this year or pay US$10bn for their partnership work.

Alongside OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups attracting commercial traction for using AI to automate coding. It has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022. According to data shared with Reuters earlier this month, Cursor has roughly US$2.6bn in annualised business-to-business revenue, with enterprise sales growing sharply.

The software platform is used by major global corporations including Stripe, Adobe and NVIDIA, with the latter's CEO Jensen Huang describing Cursor as his favourite enterprise AI service.

The deal gives xAI, with which SpaceX merged in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market, where it has so far lagged compared to its rivals. 

A supercomputer capacity 

The acquisition looks set to give Cursor with more computing capacity to develop its AI models.

In a statement given in April, SpaceX shared details on how its infrastructure will assist the startup: "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."

Collaboration between the two entities has been taking place since early 2026. In March 2026, two product engineering heads at Cursor joined SpaceX to contribute to lunar projects and xAI.

It is not immediately clear if the deal will impact agreements SpaceX has to rent out its data centres. The company has struck deals with Anthropic and Alphabet-owned Google to lease cloud computing capacity worth roughly US$26bn combined on an annual basis.

Both data centre deals include 90-day termination clauses. This means SpaceX can quickly reclaim its computing capacity if its new software division needs it.

However, SpaceX’s multi-trillion-dollar valuation rests entirely on future potential rather than current financial returns. 

The company has mostly remained unprofitable in the past, posting combined losses of more than US$9bn across 2025 and 2026 due to aggressive infrastructure spending.

Nevertheless, the previous absorption of xAI and this latest takeover of Anysphere show that the newly-crowned trillionaire is clearly betting on a digital future.