Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, the Israeli AI-infrastructure startup, for roughly $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported October 11, citing people familiar with the discussions. The talks have reportedly reached a fairly advanced stage, and a deal could close within days — provided the negotiations don't collapse and no other bidder steps in, the people told the Journal. Neither Amazon nor Decart has commented.
It is the third different buyer linked to Decart in four months. Founded in 2023 by Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev — engineers who met in Israel's Unit 8200 military-intelligence corps — Decart builds DOS, software that lets a trained AI model run efficiently across Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon's own Trainium chips, cutting the chip-specific tuning work that normally takes months down to weeks. It last raised money in May 2026: a $300 million round that valued the company near $4 billion. The company also develops two other products: Lucy, a real-time video model, and Oasis, a world-generation model built for training and testing robots.
In August, Bloomberg reported Anthropic was negotiating to buy Decart for about $6 billion — its largest deal to date — after Decart's founders favored Anthropic's offer over a competing approach from Nvidia. Anthropic reportedly completed due diligence on the deal. Then, last month, it walked away. Neither Bloomberg's reporting nor Anthropic itself has said why.
Decart's own pitch, unchanged across all three reported suitors, rests on numbers the company has not opened to independent testing: it says DOS runs full-HD video inference at up to 100 frames per second and pushes agentic inference to roughly 1,600 tokens per second, against what it puts at a roughly 200-token-per-second industry baseline. Those are company-reported figures, not independently verified by any of the reported bidders or by outside benchmarking — and no acquisition report so far has cited a third-party benchmark confirming them either. Whatever Decart is actually worth to a buyer, it rests partly on taking the company's own performance claims at face value.
What each reported Decart deal actually got to
- Undisclosed · Nvidia, mid-2026
- An earlier approach Decart's founders considered and passed on.
Includes: A competing acquisition interest, per Bloomberg's August reporting.
Excludes: Any confirmed price — reporting says only that the founders favored Anthropic's offer instead. - $6B · Anthropic, Aug–Sept 2026
- A deal that reportedly cleared due diligence, then died.
Includes: Completed due diligence, per Bloomberg.
Excludes: A signed agreement, or any stated reason for walking away. - ~$7B · Amazon, Oct 2026 (reported)
- The current, unconfirmed talks.
Includes: What the Journal's sources describe as discussions at a fairly advanced stage.
Excludes: A signed deal — the Journal's own sourcing flags the talks could still collapse.
The strategic logic for Amazon tracks a pattern familiar from the Anthropic talks: DOS's value isn't Decart's consumer-facing video tools, it's the chip-portability layer underneath them. Decart reportedly got early access to Amazon's Trainium3 chips before their wider release last year, after a meeting with senior AWS engineers who came away impressed with the founders. For AWS — which sells Trainium chips into a market Nvidia still dominates — owning the software that makes switching chips cheap and fast is a direct hedge against customers staying locked into Nvidia's ecosystem.
“This market is moving so fast. We get to reinvent every different aspect of the economy in the next 18 to 24 months.” — Dean Leitersdorf, Decart co-founder and CEO
(Leitersdorf said that in August, about the pace of AI infrastructure deals generally — not about his own company's situation specifically. Four months and three reported suitors later, it reads less like color commentary and more like a forecast.) The irony is that one of the three suitors already has a direct stake in how this plays out.
- Would gain DOS's cross-chip efficiency layer at a moment AWS is racing to get customers onto its own Trainium silicon rather than Nvidia's.
- Has taken up to $33 billion in Amazon investment and committed over $100 billion to AWS over 10 years — and would be watching its own backer buy the company it spent weeks vetting and then declined.
- A further markup on paper if $7 billion closes — nearly double the roughly $4 billion valuation they priced three months before Anthropic's talks even surfaced.
- Already uncertain under Anthropic's reported infrastructure-only interest; even less obviously useful to an AWS-focused buyer with no consumer-video or robotics business of its own.
Even basic facts about Decart aren't fully settled across this week's coverage. SiliconANGLE and the company's own history describe it as an Israeli-founded startup — its three founders met in Israel's Unit 8200 — while BigGo Finance's account of the same WSJ report calls it a "San Francisco startup." Both can be true at once (a company incorporated or headquartered in the US with Israeli founders and roots is common in this industry), but neither outlet's version spells out which; Decart's own site and its original funding coverage both describe the founders' roots as Israeli.
Zoom out and the pattern isn't really about Decart at all. 2026 has been a year of compute-adjacent M&A happening at a pace none of the frontier labs would have attempted two years ago — Anthropic and OpenAI both confidentially filed draft S-1s this year while still closing multibillion-dollar acquisitions and infrastructure deals in the same stretch, treating pre-IPO scrutiny and acquisition-scale spending as compatible rather than sequential. A $6–$7 billion purchase of a three-year-old efficiency-software startup is, in that context, a mid-sized line item rather than a landmark — which is itself the more interesting fact than who ends up signing the check.
What's confirmed, in both companies' own record, is the backdrop: Amazon has committed up to $33 billion to Anthropic, which has in turn committed over $100 billion to AWS over the next decade — an expanding bet on both sides — while Decart has made a habit of raising money without ever confirming that acquisition talks exist at all. The deal chain itself — Nvidia's informal interest, Anthropic's due-diligence reversal, Amazon's current talks — rests entirely on reporting attributed to unnamed people, and none of the four companies involved has issued an on-record statement confirming any of it.
- Amazon is reportedly in advanced talks to buy AI infrastructure startup Decart for about $7 billion.
- Anthropic completed due diligence on a $6 billion Decart deal, then walked away in September.
- Decart's software lets AI workloads shift between Nvidia, Google and Amazon's own chips.
- Amazon is itself one of Anthropic's largest investors, with up to $33 billion committed.
- Nothing is signed — the Journal's own sourcing says talks could still collapse or draw a new bidder.