San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – SpaceX on Tuesday announced a partnership with AI coding company Cursor and said the alliance comes with an option to buy the startup for $60 billion later this year. The move by Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company comes as it prepares to become publicly traded, and shortly after it took over the billionaire’s artificial intelligence outfit xAI.
Cursor, founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, specializes in AI for creating software code, particularly for business uses. “SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” the company said in a post on X. Combining Cursor’s software and product expertise with SpaceX’s “Colossus” AI training supercomputer will enable the company “to build the world’s most useful models,” it said.
The partnership comes as AI sector rivals vie to be the preferred option for software developers. Cursor competes with Microsoft’s social coding platform GitHub, which has been a leading resource in the developer community. OpenAI announced on Tuesday that its coding tool, Codex, has grown to four million weekly users, up from three million just weeks ago. Meanwhile, Anthropic has put out word that revenue from its Claude Code tool for developers has surged.
Musk announced in February that SpaceX would acquire xAI, a step in his plan to launch solar-powered, satellite-based data centers to run future AI models. SpaceX has set the pace in the space launch market, offering reusable rockets that vastly reduce the cost of putting satellites into orbit and itself owning the largest satellite constellation, Starlink. The company is set for a stock market listing this year widely expected to be the biggest in history, with media reports pointing to an initial public offering (IPO) as early as June.
Musk called SpaceX’s absorption of xAI “not just the next chapter, but the next book” for the companies. “Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions… The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space,” Musk wrote when his companies were merged. The project fits into Musk’s long-term ambition to build colonies on the Moon and Mars and is “a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization,” he wrote. Coined in the 1960s by a Soviet astronomer, the futurist term refers to a civilization able to use all of the energy from its home system’s star.
SpaceX filed papers early this year with US regulators that set the stage for what could be the largest-ever public stock offering, a source familiar with the matter told AFP. The confidential filing puts the rocket and satellite builder on track to list its shares on a public exchange by July, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources. Media reports have said the initial public offering could be valued at a whopping $75 billion or more, for a venture with stratospheric ambitions. If successful, SpaceX could arrive on Wall Street with a valuation exceeding $1.75 trillion, putting it among the world’s ten biggest companies by market capitalization. Besides SpaceX, two other tech heavyweights, the AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic, are reportedly planning IPOs this year.
© 2024 AFP
