SpaceX is moving fast on its AI ambitions. Just days after going public in a Nasdaq debut that valued the company at more than $2 trillion, SpaceX announced on Tuesday it is acquiring Anysphere — the startup behind the popular AI coding assistant Cursor — for $60 billion in an all-stock deal. The acquisition strengthens xAI’s position in one of the few corners of the AI industry where companies have already converted the technology into substantial business revenue.
The deal is not a surprise to anyone following SpaceX closely. The company unveiled an option back in April to either purchase Cursor outright for $60 billion later in the year or pay $10 billion for a partnership arrangement instead. SpaceX chose the larger commitment. Cursor will be paid entirely in stock, and the transaction will not draw on proceeds from SpaceX’s recent IPO. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.
Markets responded immediately and enthusiastically. SpaceX shares rose nearly 10% in premarket trading, adding roughly $247 billion to the company’s market capitalisation of $2.53 trillion. At $211.27 per share, the stock has now climbed more than 56% above its $135 IPO price. If those gains hold, SpaceX would overtake Amazon in market value to become the fifth-largest publicly traded company in the world — an extraordinary achievement for a company that completed its IPO only days earlier.
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Why Cursor — and Why Now
Cursor has scaled rapidly since its 2022 founding, generating approximately $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue with enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data. It competes directly with Anthropic and OpenAI for developer attention, using AI to automate coding work in a way that has already produced measurable returns for the businesses using it. The company’s growth has reportedly been constrained primarily by limited access to computing power — a constraint SpaceX’s infrastructure could solve immediately.
Cursor counts some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture firms among its backers, including Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, alongside strategic investors Nvidia and Alphabet’s Google. The company had reportedly been in talks earlier this year for a separate funding round that would have valued it at $50 billion — a figure SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition price comfortably surpasses.
The acquisition fits directly into the $28.5 trillion addressable market SpaceX pitched to investors ahead of its IPO, with AI coding tools representing a core pillar of that strategy alongside rocket launches, Starlink, and the broader AI capabilities absorbed through February’s merger with xAI and its Grok chatbot.
The regulatory filing outlining the deal includes specific termination provisions. SpaceX would owe a $10 billion termination fee if the deal collapses under certain circumstances, and a separate $4 billion “regulatory” termination fee if antitrust concerns scuttle the transaction. It remains unclear whether the acquisition will affect SpaceX’s existing arrangements to lease out its data centre capacity — the company has struck deals with both Anthropic and Google in recent weeks worth approximately $26 billion combined annually, each including 90-day termination clauses that would allow SpaceX to reclaim computing capacity quickly if needed.
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