- Amazon is reportedly in talks to buy Decart for about $7B, the Wall Street Journal said.
- Anthropic walked away from a roughly $6B Decart deal in September after due diligence.
- The price is about 75% above Decart’s valuation of nearly $4B in May.
Anthropic spent weeks examining Decart, then walked away. Now Amazon is reportedly willing to pay more.
Amazon is in talks to acquire the Israeli-founded AI startup for around $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A deal could come soon if talks do not collapse or another suitor does not emerge, according to the report.
The Journal, citing PitchBook data, said Decart was valued at nearly $4 billion in May. At $7 billion, that is a premium of roughly 75% in under five months.
What Amazon would be buying
Decart was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf, his brother Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev. Dean is chief executive, Shalev is chief product officer, and Orian is chief technology officer, according to Radical Ventures. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with operations in New York and Tel Aviv, per its May funding announcement.
Its core product is DOS, the Decart Optimization Stack. The software lets developers run AI workloads on Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, or Amazon’s Trainium chips without rebuilding for each.
SiliconANGLE reports that tuning a model for a chip used to take months and DOS can cut that to a couple of weeks. Decart also builds its own models. Lucy edits live video in real time, and Oasis generates simulated environments for training robots and autonomous-driving systems.
Amazon has run this play before
In January 2015, Amazon bought Israeli chip startup Annapurna Labs for a reported $350 million, a price Amazon never confirmed. Annapurna’s engineers went on to build the Graviton processors, the Trainium and Inferentia AI chips, and the Nitro system. Decart would add something different: software that keeps chips busy rather than a new chip.
Amazon already knows Decart well. AWS gave the startup early access to Trainium3 in 2025 after executives were impressed by the founders, the Journal reported.
At AWS re:Invent in December 2025, Leitersdorf said the chip delivers “up to 4x faster frame generation at half the cost of GPUs.” In May, Amazon became a strategic customer under a commercial agreement and joint go-to-market plan.
The rest of Amazon’s 2026 follows the same pattern. In April, it committed $5 billion to Anthropic, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones. Anthropic pledged to spend more than $100 billion on AWS technologies over 10 years.
In June, Amazon joined Odyssey’s $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation, and AWS became the world-model startup’s preferred cloud.
The scramble for compute is visible across the sector. SpaceX is reportedly seeking $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips, and Nvidia-backed Lambda is reportedly eyeing $4 billion before a 2027 IPO. Startups building world models, including SpAItial in 3D, are drawing capital too.
What the reported deal does not answer
Nobody has said why Anthropic walked away. SiliconANGLE noted it is not clear what dissuaded Anthropic. Dealroom described Decart’s claims of 8x speed-ups and 100x cost-efficiency gains as self-reported and hard to verify independently.
Then there is neutrality. DOS sells on working across Nvidia, Google, and Amazon chips. Nvidia is a Decart investor and was reportedly in advanced talks to buy it before higher bids arrived, Calcalist reported. Whether the software stays chip-neutral under Amazon’s ownership is the question rival cloud customers will ask.
At $7 billion, Amazon would pay about 20 times the reported price of Annapurna Labs. Anthropic priced Decart at about $6 billion and passed. Whichever call proves right will show how much the software layer of the chip race is worth.
