By Reuters

(Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX.O) said on Tuesday it would acquire Anysphere, the software firm behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion, in ​a bid to ramp up its presence in the enterprise AI ‌market.

The announcement comes just days after Musk took his rockets-to-AI company public in a blockbuster Nasdaq debut that valued the firm at more than $2 trillion and immediately made it one ​of the world's most valuable companies.

SpaceX said it expects the merger to ​close during the third quarter of 2026.

SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor ⁠for several months. The company said in April it had secured an option ​to either acquire San Francisco-based Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 ​billion for their new partnership.

Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a ​business where AI companies have found early commercial traction.

Cursor's business has scaled ​rapidly since its founding in 2022, with roughly $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales ‌growing ⁠sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters earlier this month.

The deal could give xAI, the Grok chatbot maker that SpaceX merged with in February, a stronger foothold in the AI coding market where it has so far lagged rivals. ​It would also ​provide Cursor with ⁠more computing capacity to develop AI models.

In March, two product engineering heads at Cursor said they joined SpaceX to contribute ​to the company's lunar projects and xAI.