Amazon in talks to buy AI startup Decart for about $7 billion

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 11 that Amazon is in talks to buy Israeli-founded AI startup Decart for about $7 billion. A deal could come within days, but talks could also collapse or draw another bidder. Neither company commented.

Decart was valued near $4 billion in May, so $7 billion would be a premium of about 75% in under five months. Anthropic reportedly walked away from a roughly $6 billion deal after due diligence. Amazon already knows the company, having given it early access to Trainium3 chips in 2025.

Its Decart Optimization Stack lets AI workloads run efficiently on Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs or Amazon Trainium, so models are not tied to one kind of hardware. It also builds Lucy and Oasis, world models that generate video in real time.

Much of the chip race is about software. Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem makes switching costly, and Decart lowers that barrier. A world model learns how an environment looks and behaves and can render it in response to a user's actions.

Amazon wants Trainium to be a real alternative to Nvidia, and customers will only switch if their models run well on it. Buying Decart would give Amazon a ready team and technology for that bridge, showing the chip war is now fought through software acquisitions too.

The Decart talks are the latest in a race by big tech firms to buy AI startups or hire their teams through licensing deals, from chip optimization to data infrastructure. The common thread is buying expertise that would take years to build. Amazon returning with a higher price after Anthropic walked away shows how much the technology is valued.

Chip competition lowers AI prices. Compare cloud options for the same workload as providers discount services on their own chips, avoid locking into one provider's proprietary tools, and watch real-time video models, which will soon reach product demos and social content.