SpaceX said on Tuesday that it would acquire the parent company of Cursor, an artificial intelligence code-writing start-up, for $60 billion, just days after Elon Musk’s rocket and A.I. company made its record-breaking public market debut.
SpaceX agreed to a deal with Cursor in April that gave it the option to acquire the company, an arrangement that would “allow us to build the world’s most useful” A.I. models, SpaceX said at the time.
It pushed ahead with an all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the parent of Cursor, after SpaceX’s initial public offering last week. The company’s shares have continued to climb sharply since they started trading on Friday, making Mr. Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
The company is now valued at roughly $2.5 trillion. Its stock rose more than 13 percent in early trading on Tuesday.
SpaceX’s main business has been building rocket ships and offering satellite internet, but Mr. Musk has increasingly expanded his empire to take advantage of the A.I. boom.
In 2023, Mr. Musk founded xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot that was built to compete with rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The A.I. start-up has spent billions to catch up. That includes building in Tennessee two massive data centers, the computing sites for powering the technology, known as Colossus 1 and 2.
In February, Mr. Musk merged SpaceX with xAI, which already owned his social media company X. The deal valued the combined venture at more than $1 trillion, and stoked Mr. Musk’s desire to build data centers in space.
“The capabilities we will unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the universe,” Mr. Musk said in a memo to workers at the time.
Last month, SpaceX outlined plans for the first stage of an A.I. chip manufacturing project in Texas that would cost at least $55 billion. And because of its massive data centers, SpaceX has inked deals with both Google and Anthropic worth potentially billions of dollars to provide A.I. computing power.
Still, in filings leading up to SpaceX’s I.P.O., the company outlined how heavy spending on A.I. was a drain on profitability.
Mr. Musk’s companies have a history of merging with one another, but they rarely acquire outside companies. He also helms Tesla, the publicly traded electric car manufacturer, as well as several smaller ventures.
The acquisition of Cursor is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, SpaceX said in a regulatory filing.
Cursor was founded in 2022 and quickly made waves as tech companies adopted its tools. It amassed billions in funding from top investment firms including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.
In April, when the potential acquisition was first announced, Cursor said that its lack of access to computing power for training its A.I. models had “bottlenecked” its growth. The deal with SpaceX would give it access to xAI’s infrastructure.
Adding Cursor to the fold could help xAI play catch up on coding tools, an area in which it has fallen behind. In March, xAI hired two former Cursor leaders to help refocus its efforts.
After the hires were announced, Mr. Musk posted that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”
