SpaceX completes $60 billion acquisition of Cursor startup

Cursor, a startup that builds a code-writing environment powered by large language models (LLM), officially became part of SpaceX, the rocket company, according to a blog post. The deal, which closed after months of planning, places Cursor’s development tools directly on the computing infrastructure that SpaceX builds and leases to customers such as Anthropic and Google.

In April the two companies announced a technology partnership that gave SpaceX an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. Two months later, concurrent with SpaceX’s IPO that turned it into a public company, the parties confirmed they were moving forward with exercising the option, and the option has now been exercised in full.

In the closing announcement Cursor repeated its claim that SpaceX holds “the world’s largest GPU fleet.” The fleet, based on data centers powered by gas turbines, already serves external customers that need massive processing power for training and running models. For Cursor, direct access to those resources “should enable” execution of larger models with shorter response times, without relying on third-party cloud providers.

A lawsuit alleging air pollution from the gas turbines that power SpaceX’s data centers is proceeding in the background. SpaceX did not comment on the suit, but the link between the polluting infrastructure and the ability to offer abundant, low-cost compute is part of the less-discussed context.

Cursor will continue to operate as an independent brand, but its development will now occur “close to the metal,” on SpaceX hardware, with preferred capacity access. The promise is that the intelligence becomes useful specifically in code-writing tools, although no official benchmark has been released to substantiate the claim. Developers receive a promise of unlimited compute access, and how much of that will translate into real productivity gains remains open.