Days after going public on the promise of rockets and satellites, SpaceX spent $60 billion on a coding tool. It might be the most bizarrely specific corporate pivot in history — and it’s actually the latest step in a strategy that started months ago.
On Friday 12 June, SpaceX made its Nasdaq debut at $135 per share, racking up a $1.75 trillion valuation and raising $75 billion — the largest initial public offering in history. The pitch was, understandably, about Starship, Starlink, and the future of space travel. It was a rocket company’s IPO, through and through.
Four days later, on Tuesday 16 June, SpaceX confirmed it would acquire Anysphere — the startup behind Cursor, the AI-powered code editor — for $60 billion in an all-stock deal. That is a number so large it barely fits in your head. For context, that’s roughly the entire GDP of Portugal.
The pattern behind the headline
If you step back from the $60 billion figure, the Cursor acquisition isn’t actually the most surprising thing SpaceX has done in 2026. It’s the latest chapter in a story that began on 2 February, when SpaceX quietly absorbed xAI — Musk’s own AI lab and maker of the Grok chatbot — in a merger valued at $1.25 trillion.
That merger gave SpaceX the computing infrastructure. Cursor supplies what xAI couldn’t: a widely adopted AI coding product with a large base of professional software engineers already paying for it. Cursor carries roughly $2.6 billion in annualised B2B revenue, with enterprise customers including Adobe, Stripe, and Nvidia — whose CEO Jensen Huang has called it his “favourite enterprise AI service.”
But the acquisition also reads as a defensive move. Cursor’s market share in the AI coding tool space has fallen from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% by May 2026, as Anthropic’s Claude Code has achieved what Ars Technica calls “dominance in the space.” A $2 billion funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Thrive Capital never closed. Even the founders admitted their growth was bottlenecked on compute. Buying into SpaceX wasn’t just a sale — it was a rescue.
The compute empire nobody expected
The Cursor deal is the headline, but the real story is what SpaceX is building underneath it. In 2025, the company spent $20.7 billion on capital expenditure — of which $12.7 billion went into AI. That’s more than half their total spend, and it’s on things like data centres, Nvidia GPUs, and the COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II training clusters near Memphis, Tennessee.
And now they’re leasing that infrastructure out. On 22 June — just three days ago — Reflection AI announced it would pay SpaceX $150 million per month beginning in July through 2029 for access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 AI chips at the Colossus 2 facility. That deal is worth up to $6.3 billion. It sits alongside even bigger commitments: Anthropic at $1.25 billion per month, and Google at $920 million per month, both also running through mid-2029.
So the full picture is: a company that went public selling rockets is simultaneously building one of the world’s largest AI compute farms, acquiring the coding tools that run on top of it, and renting capacity to other AI companies at prices that make cloud providers look cheap. It’s part aerospace company, part data centre landlord, part AI tool vendor.
The irony nobody’s talking about
The PYMNTS article about the Cursor deal has a headline that captures the central tension: “SpaceX Bets $60 Billion on AI It Couldn’t Build.” The xAI merger gave them infrastructure, not product. The AI segment that SpaceX absorbed through the xAI merger posted a $6.35 billion operating loss in 2025 and burned an additional $2.5 billion in 2024. The rockets are profitable. The AI isn’t — yet.
But then again, this is Elon Musk. The same person who spent $44 billion on Twitter, then renamed it X, then quietly sold the domain for $1. For him, a $60 billion acquisition of a VS Code fork that helps engineers write code faster isn’t absurd — it’s just Tuesday. The question for SpaceX shareholders is whether the AI infrastructure play justifies the valuation, or whether the $1.75 trillion price tag was priced on rockets and satellites, not unprofitable AI labs and coding tools.
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. If history is any guide, by then SpaceX will have announced something else entirely that makes the Cursor purchase look like the sensible move.
Sources
– SpaceX buys AI startup Cursor for $60 billion — AP News
– SpaceX to acquire AI coding platform Cursor for $60 billion — Ars Technica
– Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share — Reuters
– SpaceX says it’s worth $1.75tn as it targets largest stock market debut — BBC
– SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI — TechCrunch
– SpaceX Bets $60 Billion on AI It Couldn’t Build — PYMNTS
