Elon Musk is once again raising his multi-billion dollar bets on artificial intelligence (AI), in his struggle with OpenAI and Anthropic. His company SpaceX has announced an agreement that grants it the right to acquire the AI start-up Cursor for 60 billion dollars (about 51.05 billion euros) by the end of this year, or the option to pay 10 billion for the joint work carried out between both companies.
Musk’s rocket, satellite, and AI giant, which recently merged with xAI, a start-up controlled by the magnate himself, announced the agreement in a post on his social network X, stating that both companies are “collaborating closely to create the world’s best AI for programming and knowledge management.”
The new agreement comes shortly after Musk declared that xAI, which has already accumulated strong investments since its launch (in January it closed a 20 billion dollar financing round), was lagging behind its rivals in software programming tools and pledged to rebuild the company from scratch. In fact, in March, it initiated a round of layoffs. Musk’s firm has also been seeking engineering talent and had already hired Cursor personnel.
The move comes at a time of intense financial activity at SpaceX, which is preparing a multi-billion dollar IPO, highly anticipated by the market. Precisely, SpaceX will not acquire Cursor immediately due to the imminent IPO, according to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the process.
A transaction of this volume would force the company to update its financial reports, which could delay the IPO, in which the company could reach a valuation of two trillion dollars and raise 75 billion, making it the largest IPO in history, ahead of that of Saudi oil company Aramco in 2019. The 10 billion dollars constitute a penalty for breaking the agreement, according to sources familiar with the operation.
Cursor had been in talks with investors to raise around 2 billion dollars in a financing round with a valuation exceeding 50 billion dollars, not including the investment. The firm has canceled the operation as the capital was intended to finance Cursor’s computing needs. Among Cursor’s investors are Nvidia, Alphabet, OpenAI’s own venture capital fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Accel, and DST Global.
The start-up‘s AI assistant, launched in 2023, helps programmers write and debug code more efficiently. Cursor has become one of the fastest-growing start-ups in history and a key player in the era of “intuitive programming” in the tech sector, due to the increasing demand among software developers for tools that can create applications from chatbot prompts.
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Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, which have closed multi-billion dollar financing rounds in the first quarter of 2026, Cursor is one of the Silicon Valley start-ups that have attracted numerous developers by using AI to automate coding, a business in which AI companies have found early commercial traction.
However, programming with AI requires many computing resources, something SpaceX possesses in abundance thanks to its enormous data centers in the North American states of Tennessee and Mississippi. The SpaceX team “has enormous processing capacity, and we believe that together we can expand our efforts in model development, and we are very excited about it,” declared Oskar Schulz, president of Cursor. “We really like their team,” he stated.
With this corporate operation with Cursor, Musk would also be trying to confront OpenAI and Anthropic, which have accelerated their acquisition race to develop their technological projects, also with an eye on their future IPOs. Sam Altman’s company has acquired TBPN, Promptfoo, and OpenClaw in recent weeks, while its rival has incorporated Coefficient Bio and Vercept.
“The combination of Cursor’s leading product and its distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s Colossus training supercomputer, equivalent to one million H100s, will allow us to create the world’s most useful models,” SpaceX declared in its post on X. Colossus is xAI’s supercomputer cluster in Memphis, which the company has promoted as the largest in the world.
Among the growth projects launched by Musk, ahead of SpaceX’s IPO, is his new plan to manufacture its own chips. Last March, the magnate announced the launch of the Terafab project, through which Tesla and SpaceX will have their own factories, to reduce dependence on manufacturers such as Samsung, TSMC, or Micron Technology. In the project, SpaceX and Tesla already have partners like Intel.
