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OpenAI Buys Windsurf to Sit by the River of Developer Thought

7 min readMay 7, 2025
Image: PD, by Dom Gould: https://www.pexels.com/pl-pl/zdjecie/malowniczy-widok-na-rzeke-325807/

OpenAI just spent $3 billion on Windsurf, a fork of VSCode that’s quietly become a favorite among developers. It’s a strategic move to get closer to the flow of developer work — where thoughts become code, and questions can become someday training data

As media report OpenAI bought Windsurf for $3 billion. From this article you’ll learn why everything is talking about it, and what it means.

Why Spend $3B on a Code Editor?

So first let’s look into the details of the deal. Three billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, and it in fact is. You can build 20 000 affordable homes in the US for that amount of money providing shelter to around 6.5% of homeless people living in the country.

So why OpenAI decided to spend that money on buying Windsurf? Let’s break it down. OpenAI is a San Francisco based research organisation (not a company…) that develops AI models and interfaces. For example ChatGPT (the chat with an AI), or DALL-E for image generation. It offers models you can download, and also models you can interact with through API. So if you build some project, you can send…

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Tom Smykowski
Tom Smykowski

Written by Tom Smykowski

I help startups ship stunning, scalable MVPs—fast. With deep frontend expertise and AI-powered development workflows, I build and audit. Programmer

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