SpaceX shares climb on Cursor news

SpaceX shares reached a new all-time high after the company confirmed a deal to acquire AI coding tool Cursor, developed by startup Anysphere, for $60 billion paid in company stock. According to Yahoo Finance, the transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, and represents one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the AI sector.

Cursor is a so-called AI-native coding tool that allows developers to write, debug, and refactor code using advanced language models. The company reports having over one million paying customers and more than 50,000 engineering teams as users, including major names such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Datadog, and Adobe.

$60B
Purchase price (all-stock)
$2B
Cursor's ARR (2026)
SpaceX acquires AI giant Cursor for $60 billion - Bilde 1

From space to AI powerhouse

This acquisition is not SpaceX's first move into AI. In February 2026, xAI — Elon Musk's AI laboratory and developer of the Grok chatbot — was folded into SpaceX. The goal has been to create what the company itself describes as a "vertically integrated innovation machine" combining launch capacity, Starlink's satellite infrastructure, and AI technology into a single unified entity.

Cursor fits directly into this strategy. According to research based on the company's own disclosures, the integration will give Cursor access to xAI's Colossus supercomputer with 555,000 GPUs. An upcoming AI model developed in collaboration with SpaceX is to be pre-trained on 100,000 GPUs and is estimated to have 1.5 trillion parameters.

Cursor's valuation has risen more than 12,000 percent in under two years
SpaceX acquires AI giant Cursor for $60 billion - Bilde 2

Impressive growth — but treat the numbers critically

Cursor's growth story is striking. According to research, the company went from a valuation of $400 million in August 2024 to over $50 billion in May 2026 — an increase of more than 12,000 percent in under two years. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is reported to have surpassed $2 billion.

It is important to note that these figures largely originate from the company's own communications materials and have not been independently verified by 24markets. The $60 billion acquisition valuation is, however, a negotiated transaction price, which gives it a degree of market grounding.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell has said of the access to SpaceX's computing power:

"We're running on 10 to 20 times more compute than we've ever had access to — this scale-up is really letting us reach the frontier."

Starlink funds the AI ambitions

Investing in AI is expensive, and it is largely Starlink's revenues that are footing the bill. The satellite internet service generated more than $11 billion in revenue in 2025 according to SpaceX, accounting for more than half of the group's total revenues. Nearly 60 percent of the estimated $20 billion in capital expenditure for 2025 was earmarked for AI development.

In its IPO documentation, the company has partly positioned itself as an AI infrastructure company with an estimated addressable market of $28.5 trillion — of which $26.5 trillion is tied to the AI segment.

Ambitious plans for space-based computing

Further on the horizon are SpaceX's plans to launch what the company calls "orbital AI computing satellites" — essentially space-based data centers. According to available information, the first demonstration systems could be ready for launch toward the end of 2027, with full-scale deployment from 2028. Musk has claimed that space-based computing capacity will, within two to three years, become the cheapest way to generate AI power.

These plans remain unsubstantiated promises for now, and 24markets emphasizes that such technological timeline projections from the company itself should be read with caution.

What does this mean for the market?

For investors, the acquisition signals that SpaceX is moving with full force into the battle for AI infrastructure — a market that already includes Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia. The company is not publicly listed, but private shares are actively traded on secondary markets, and the share price rise following the Cursor news reflects increased interest from institutional investors.

For Norwegian technology and growth equity portfolios, the story is primarily relevant as a signal of the strength in the AI tools sector more broadly, and as an indicator of the valuation levels the market is currently willing to pay for scaled AI products with documented revenue.