The Amazon and Decart logos. Image: Amazon and Decart
Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, the AI startup Anthropic walked away from last month, for around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. No deal has been announced, and the talks could still fall apart.
The price would be almost double the roughly $4 billion Decart was valued at in May, when it raised $300 million. Neither Amazon nor Decart has commented publicly on the talks.
What Decart makes
Decart, founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, is best known for real-time AI video. Its Lucy model transforms live video as it streams, for things like virtual try-on, in-video advertising and games, and its Oasis model generates interactive simulated worlds for training robots and self-driving systems.
The part Amazon appears to want sits underneath. The Journal says Decart’s software makes it easier for developers to switch between different AI chips, which matters more as companies scramble for any computing power they can get. Decart calls it the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS, and when it announced its funding round on May 18 it said DOS runs on Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon’s own Trainium chips. The company claims more than a 100x improvement in cost efficiency over comparable systems, a figure that hasn’t been independently checked.
For Amazon, that could make it easier to move customers’ work off Nvidia hardware and onto Trainium, the same gap DeepSeek has been filling for Huawei’s chips.
Amazon is already a customer
Amazon is no stranger to Decart. The startup’s May announcement named Amazon as a strategic customer and said the two had signed a commercial agreement and a joint sales push to bring Decart’s models to AWS customers, with Lucy 2 running on Trainium3. The executive who runs Amazon’s chip design arm praised the work at the time:
Decart is the kind of partner we love working with: technologically fearless, fast-moving, and deeply innovative. They were among the first in the world to optimize on Trainium3
Nafea Bshara, Vice President, Amazon’s Annapurna Labs
Nvidia, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures, which led the May round, are among Decart’s investors, and the company says it has raised more than $450 million in total.
Anthropic walked away first
Amazon is not the first big name at the table. Bloomberg reported on September 8 that Anthropic had dropped a plan to buy Decart for about $6 billion after carrying out due diligence, though the two could still work together in other ways. It would have been the Claude maker’s biggest acquisition. According to Globes, Decart’s founders had earlier turned down a higher offer from Nvidia, preferring Anthropic’s offer in shares ahead of its planned stock market listing.
That makes the Amazon talks awkward to read. Amazon has invested billions in Anthropic and is one of its main cloud and chip suppliers, so a deal would hand Amazon a company its own AI partner looked at closely and passed on. Neither Anthropic nor Amazon has said why.
Decart’s founders have framed the company as a world model lab first. Leitersdorf said in May:
World models are the key to moving AI from the virtual world into the physical world.
Dean Leitersdorf, CEO and co-founder, Decart
A deal would be the second big world model buyout in a matter of weeks, after AMD agreed to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for about $8.2 billion.
Why it matters
Big tech companies are now paying billions for the software that decides which chips AI runs on. If Amazon closes the deal, it gets a tool that could pull customers towards Trainium and away from Nvidia, plus two working world models, a month after Anthropic walked away at $6 billion.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal; Decart funding announcement (May 18, 2026); Bloomberg; Globes.
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