--- title: xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI description: SpaceX has secured an option to acquire AI coding tool Cursor (built by Anysphere) for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for a joint development partnership if... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/xai-and-cursor-announce-partnership-to-build-coding-ai-kxp9xx21e twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI | daily.dev og:description: SpaceX has secured an option to acquire AI coding tool Cursor (built by Anysphere) for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for a joint development partnership if... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/xai-and-cursor-announce-partnership-to-build-coding-ai-kxp9xx21e og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/kxP9xx21E.png og:image:alt: xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 4 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary SpaceX has secured an option to acquire AI coding tool Cursor (built by Anysphere) for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for a joint development partnership if the acquisition doesn't close. Cursor had grown to $2B+ ARR and a $29.3B valuation, previously rejecting OpenAI acquisition interest. The deal pairs Cursor's coding product with SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer to build a competitive coding AI. Key concerns for developers include potential model access changes — Anthropic and OpenAI may pull support from a tool now owned by a competitor — and whether Cursor will remain model-agnostic. The acquisition also supports SpaceX's narrative shift toward being a full AI platform ahead of its planned Nasdaq IPO. ## Content SpaceX has announced a deal with AI coding startup Cursor that gives SpaceX the right to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for their joint development work if the acquisition doesn't happen. The announcement came via SpaceX's official X account before a New York Times report initially described it as a completed deal — it isn't, at least not yet. The partnership pairs Cursor's coding product with SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer, which SpaceX describes as equivalent to one million NVIDIA H100 chips. The stated goal is building what both companies are calling "the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." ## How Cursor got here Cursor, built by the startup Anysphere, was valued at around $400 million in mid-2024. By early 2026 it had crossed $2 billion in annualized recurring revenue and closed a Series D at a $29.3 billion valuation. SpaceX's $60 billion offer represents roughly a 10x revenue multiple on projections of $6 billion ARR by year-end — aggressive, but not absurd given the growth rate. The company had previously turned down acquisition interest from OpenAI and was reportedly days away from closing a $2 billion funding round at a $50 billion valuation, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, NVIDIA, and Battery Ventures. SpaceX preempted that round entirely. One detail that makes the timing less surprising in hindsight: two of Cursor's top product engineers left for xAI/SpaceX in March, months before this announcement. Talent moved first; the paperwork followed. ## Why SpaceX wants this SpaceX absorbed xAI in February 2026 and now operates under the "SpaceXAI" banner, but it doesn't have a coding AI product that competes with OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic's Claude Code. Cursor fills that gap immediately, bringing both a proven product and the developer usage data needed to improve Grok's coding capabilities. Cursor's technical architecture is part of what makes it valuable. It uses tree-sitter for semantic code chunking, Merkle trees for incremental indexing, vector embeddings stored in a database called turbopuffer for meaning-based search, and graph traversal to pull related code context. That's not trivial to replicate. There's also a compute angle. Cursor had been constrained by GPU access; xAI has abundant capacity but no competitive coding product. The partnership is a straightforward exchange of what each side lacks. Finally, there's the IPO story. SpaceX is targeting a Nasdaq listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Its xAI division consumed 61% of $20.74 billion in capital spending in 2025 while posting a $6.4 billion operating loss — currently subsidized by Starlink's $4.42 billion operating income. Adding Cursor reframes SpaceX's public narrative from rocket company to full AI platform, which matters for how investors price the stock. ## What this means for Cursor users The deal raises real questions about model access. Cursor currently supports multiple models including Claude and GPT-4o. SpaceX now has obvious incentives to route users toward Grok instead. This isn't hypothetical — Anthropic cut off Windsurf's model access when Windsurf entered acquisition talks with OpenAI. The same dynamic could play out here, with Anthropic and OpenAI reconsidering their relationships with a tool now controlled by a direct competitor. Enterprise customers in particular should be asking about change-of-control clauses in their contracts, and what happens to existing zero-data-retention agreements with current model providers. There's also a governance question: Cursor's Composer model is fine-tuned on Kimi 2.5, a Chinese base model, which some compliance teams will flag. The broader pattern is vertical integration. OpenAI has Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, Google has its own tools. The independent multi-model layer that Cursor occupied is shrinking. Whether Cursor under SpaceX remains genuinely model-agnostic is the question developers should be watching. --- Tags: [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/xai-and-cursor-announce-partnership-to-build-coding-ai-kxp9xx21e) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/xai-and-cursor-announce-partnership-to-build-coding-ai-kxp9xx21e","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/xai-and-cursor-announce-partnership-to-build-coding-ai-kxp9xx21e"},"datePublished":"2026-04-21T22:28:22.131Z","dateModified":"2026-04-26T09:31:41.695Z","description":"SpaceX has secured an option to acquire AI coding tool Cursor (built by Anysphere) for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for a joint development partnership if...","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Collections","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Collections","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--fk_6ycEi--/f_auto,q_auto/v1780996001/logos/collections?_a=BAMAMiWQ0","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/xai-and-cursor-announce-partnership-to-build-coding-ai-kxp9xx21e","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"ai-coding","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Collections","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"xAI and Cursor announce partnership to build coding AI"}]} ```