Why SpaceX just bet $60bn on 3-year-old startup?

Elon Musk's SpaceX has never been shy about swinging big, but its latest move lands far from rocket fuel and orbital trajectories. The company on Tuesday announced a deal giving it the right to acquire Cursor, a three-year-old AI coding startup, for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for the work done if no acquisition follows.

The agreement hands SpaceX a serious stake in the AI coding arms race, a market currently dominated by Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and a wave of vibe-coding tools like Lovable and Bolt. For Cursor, the trade-off is access to Colossus, SpaceX's supercomputer running on 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, computing power the startup says has been its primary bottleneck.

"We've wanted to push our training efforts much further, but we've been bottlenecked by compute," Cursor wrote in its announcement blog. The company plans to use xAI's infrastructure to train Composer 2.5, its next-generation coding model.

Cursor was built by four MIT classmates, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, who launched parent company Anysphere in 2022. Their founding thesis was simple and direct: Microsoft's Copilot bolted a chat window onto an existing editor and called it AI. They wanted something built differently from the ground up.

The firm secured a $60 million seed round via OpenAI’s Startups Fund in 2023, followed by a Series A worth $60 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. In November 2025, the company raised a Series D financing deal of $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation, with investors including Nvidia and Google joining prior funders.

Just as with its investors, Cursor's customer roster includes big names, too: Stripe, Coinbase, Discord, Salesforce, and Neuralink are among its users. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang revealed on-stage that all engineers and hardware designers at his company use Cursor every day.

After Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 in early 2026, the movement away from Cursor to Claude Code was obvious, with people citing more affordable prices while achieving similar results. A venture capitalist named Chamath Palihapitiya wrote on X that the firm had to move to Claude to cut down high token costs.

Cursor responded earlier this month by launching Cursor 3, introducing agentic capabilities that let users deploy AI coding agents for multi-step tasks, a direct answer to critics who said the product was falling behind on autonomous workflows.