they just spent 60 billion on cursor and both benefited from each other quick.SpaceX is going the same route. They're going hardcore into data centres and chips because Grok is falling behind everyone else. xAI is quickly going to become a hardware company, not an AI company.
Cursor gave xAi near best in class data, xAI gave cursor best in class compute will have to see a couple of cycle if they can keep an interesting quality per dollar (which arguably they fully achieved with grok 4.5), a bit more expensive than Muse spark but significantly cheaper than the biggest open weight model like GLM 5.2-K3.
It is not keeping up with openAI-anthropic (no one does) but it is with everyone else, ahead of google until they update gemini arguably and they were the last to start in the race, so more pacing people than falling behind.
And because xAI is in part involved (intent layer) of self driving and robotics, the spaceX physic-aeorospace AI simulation, and other first hand use case, they will stay an AI company no matter what externally pretty much and if tesla and spaceX merge (highly probable) they could get more and more involved in tesla product AI.