Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for US$60 billion (HK$470.22 billion), in a bid to ramp up its presence in the enterprise AI market.
The announcement comes days after Musk took the rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than US$2 trillion and immediately made it one of the world's most valuable companies.
SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for several months. The company said in April it had secured an option to either acquire the San Francisco-based company for US$60 billion later this year, or pay US$10 billion for a new partnership.
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 rivals. It would also provide Cursor with more computing capacity to develop AI models.
SpaceX's shares were up nearly 10 percent in premarket trading, on track to add about US$247 billion to its market capitalization of US$2.53 trillion. At US$211.27, the stock has climbed more than 56 percent from its IPO price of US$135.
If the gains hold, SpaceX is set to overtake Amazon in market value to become the fifth-largest company.
Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction.
Cursor's business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, with roughly US$2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month.
Backed by some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capital names including Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, as well as Nvidia and Alphabet's Google, Cursor had reportedly been in talks earlier this year for a funding round valuing it at US$50 billion.
The deal, which is expected to close during the third quarter of 2026, is structured as a stock-based merger between Cursor parent Anysphere and SpaceX's wholly owned subsidiary called X67, indicating the capital raised in SpaceX's IPO is not being used to fund the deal.
If the deal is ended under specific circumstances, SpaceX will pay a termination fee of US$10 billion, according to a regulatory filing.
The filing also said SpaceX will pay a "regulatory" termination fee of US$4 billion if the deal falls through due to antitrust issues.
It was not immediately clear if the deal would affect SpaceX's agreements to rent out its data centers. The company has in recent weeks struck deals with Anthropic and Google to lease cloud computing capacity worth roughly US$26 billion combined on an annual basis.
Both deals include 90-day termination clauses, meaning SpaceX could quickly reclaim computing capacity if needed.
Reuters
