By Roman Aglaganov
Amazon is in advanced talks to buy the AI startup Decart in a deal that could be worth around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on 11 October, citing people familiar with the matter. The companies could agree soon, but talks could also collapse or another bidder could appear. Neither company had announced a deal at the time of writing.
What Decart does
Decart was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers, Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, and is based in San Francisco. It works on two things:
Real-time generative models: Lucy can edit live video as it streams, and Oasis generates interactive simulated worlds, which can be used to train and test robots and self-driving systems.
Chip-switching software: tools that let developers move AI workloads between processors from different chipmakers without months of custom engineering.
It has raised more than $400 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures, and was valued at nearly $4 billion in May. Nvidia is among its backers.
Why Amazon would want it
Amazon Web Services designs its own AI chip, Trainium, to compete with Nvidia’s GPUs. The hardest part of selling an alternative chip is the software: customers do not want to rewrite everything to switch. Software that makes chips more interchangeable would make Trainium an easier choice. The two companies already know each other: AWS gave Decart early access to Trainium3 last year, according to the Journal.
Yahoo Finance reports that Anthropic had discussed buying Decart for about $6 billion in September before deciding against it.
Why it matters
The price, nearly double Decart’s valuation five months ago, shows how much the big cloud companies will pay to loosen Nvidia’s grip. If the deal goes ahead, watch whether Decart’s tools stay useful on other companies’ chips, or become a reason to stay on Amazon’s.
