Amazon in Talks to Acquire AI Startup Decart for Roughly $7 Billion

Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, a three-year-old artificial intelligence startup, in a deal that could value the company at around $7 billion, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal and follow-up analysis by GeekWire. If completed, the acquisition would rank among Amazon's largest corporate transactions, trailing its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017, its $11.57 billion deal for Globalstar in April, and its $8.45 billion takeover of MGM in 2022.

Decart, founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev, develops software designed to help AI models run faster across various chip architectures from Nvidia, Google, and Amazon. Headquartered in San Francisco with a development center in Tel Aviv, the startup licenses its optimization software to cloud providers and AI research laboratories while also building proprietary models, including real-time video editor Lucy and interactive world generator Oasis.

Owning Decart could provide Amazon Web Services with leverage against Nvidia's dominant CUDA software ecosystem. Decart's technology enables developers to migrate AI models built for Nvidia GPUs to Amazon's custom Trainium processors with fewer manual software modifications, while extracting greater computational efficiency from existing hardware.

The startup has already demonstrated integration with Amazon's silicon. At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last December, Decart used its live video model running on Amazon's Trainium3 chip to transform AWS Senior Vice President Peter DeSantis into a live animation of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels during the opening keynote. Amazon stated at the conference that Decart ran real-time video four times faster on Trainium at half the cost of GPUs.

While Decart has not disclosed its financial results, Israeli business publication Globes reported that the company has operated profitably almost from inception, though CTech reported that its revenue remains small relative to the discussed $7 billion valuation. E-commerce marketplace eBay is both a client and investor, according to Bloomberg. In May, Decart raised $300 million in a funding round that included Nvidia and valued the startup at approximately $4 billion.

Amazon is not the first major tech firm to pursue Decart. Anthropic held acquisition talks valuing Decart at around $6 billion before walking away in September following due diligence, Bloomberg reported. Globes reported that Decart's founders resisted Anthropic's push to relocate much of the Tel Aviv engineering team to San Francisco. Nvidia also held acquisition discussions before its May investment, according to CTech.

The negotiations unfold amid an industry-wide effort by major cloud providers to curb reliance on Nvidia chips. Microsoft recently announced its Maia 300 custom chip, targeting internal product deployment by 2027, while Google continues deploying TPUs and OpenAI works on custom silicon with Broadcom. Neither Amazon nor Decart has confirmed the buyout discussions.