Daijiworld Media Network - New York

New York, Aug 15: SpaceX has completed its $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, marking one of the largest technology acquisitions ever and strengthening Elon Musk’s efforts to compete with AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.

The deal became effective on August 14, according to a regulatory filing, two months after SpaceX formally announced its agreement to acquire the company.

The acquisition is aimed at helping Musk’s firm develop more advanced AI tools to streamline tasks including software coding, one of the most lucrative areas of the rapidly expanding AI market.

Musk’s AI venture, now known as SpaceXAI, had previously seen limited business adoption and undergone a series of job cuts and restructuring efforts.

Cursor’s AI assistant, launched in 2023, was designed to help programmers write and debug code more efficiently. The startup rapidly emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in the sector and became a key player in the technology industry’s “vibe coding” trend, as developers increasingly turned to AI tools capable of building software from chatbot prompts.

Following the acquisition, Cursor’s co-founders are set to become billionaires, while the startup’s team will gain access to SpaceX’s large pool of advanced AI chips.

“We will have access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world, giving us the compute to build stronger models that are also more economical to run,” Cursor said in a blog post on Friday.

SpaceX and Cursor had launched their first joint model, Grok 4.5, in July ahead of the completion of the acquisition. The model was focused on coding, finance and legal tasks and was described by the companies as cheaper to use than competing AI models.

Since then, SpaceX has released Grok Bot, a product designed to operate as a team of AI agents handling assignments throughout the day. The company has also introduced an updated Grok 4.6 model.

Alongside these developments, SpaceX has entered into a series of multibillion-dollar agreements allowing companies including Anthropic and Alphabet-owned Google to access its computing resources.

However, during a meeting with SpaceX employees in August, Musk stressed the importance of strengthening the company’s software capabilities.

The billionaire said the company “must succeed on the software front” and described artificial intelligence as the present and future of the firm.

“Our AI revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue by September,” Musk said during the meeting.