Amazon Is in Talks to Buy AI Startup Decart for About $7 Billion, WSJ Reports

Amazon is the third serious buyer in a row for a startup that makes AI chips interchangeable. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart for around $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. A deal could be wrapped up in the coming days if the talks do not collapse and no other suitor appears. Bloomberg carried the report. Neither company has confirmed it. Decart is based in San Francisco, founded in 2023 by Israeli engineers Dean Leitersdorf, his brother Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev. Its software, including a platform called DOS, is built so developers can move training and inference across different processors instead of writing for one vendor’s chip. That is the product Amazon would be buying. Not a chatbot. A layer that makes a workload less loyal to Nvidia. Why AWS Would Want It Amazon Web Services sells its own AI chips, Trainium, against Nvidia’s accelerators. A tool that optimizes a neural network for a specific processor, and that can retarget it, is a reason for a customer to try Trainium without rewriting the job. CTech reported that AWS is already a Decart customer and gave the startup early access to Trainium3 in 2025 after being impressed by the founders. An acquisition would turn a vendor relationship into an internal team, and it would keep that optimization layer off a rival cloud. The price is a jump. Decart raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation in May, in a round that brought total funding above $400 million. Investors include Radical Ventures, Nvidia Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Benchmark. Seven billion is about a 75 percent markup in five months, on a company that has not published revenue. People familiar with the talks are not a term sheet. The Journal’s own caveat is that the discussions can still fail. The Buyers Who Already Left Amazon is not the first call. Nvidia pursued an acquisition. Anthropic then became the preferred bidder, in talks reported around $6 billion to $7 billion, much of it in Anthropic stock. Anthropic pulled out in September after due diligence. The reason has not been stated. Globes reported that the founders had earlier rejected a higher Nvidia offer in favor of Anthropic’s share deal, on a bet that Anthropic would go public. That bet is still open. The buyer is not. SpaceX and Nebius have also been linked to interest in later accounts. Elon Musk has publicly denied that SpaceX was negotiating. A startup that has been in exclusive talks, then out, then in again, is a startup whose price is being set by who needs chip flexibility this quarter. Anthropic needed it less after looking at the books, or found something it did not want. Amazon, which has to sell Trainium into a market that still defaults to Nvidia, may need it more. Decart’s other work is real-time generative video and what it has called world models for interactive digital and physical environments. Coverage of the Amazon talks has led with the chip-switching software, because that is the AWS fit. A video model is a product. A compiler-like layer for accelerators is infrastructure. Amazon’s cloud business buys infrastructure. What $7 Billion Buys in This Market Seven billion dollars for a three-year-old company with a $4 billion mark in May is the AI M&A tape of 2026: strategic buyers paying up for anything that loosens Nvidia’s grip on a workload. Broadcom’s chip-lease deal with Anthropic, Google’s nuclear contracts, and the memory shortage that just produced Samsung’s record quarter are the same shortage seen from other angles. Decart is the software angle. If the tool works, a customer can point a job at Trainium, or at a GPU, without a six-month port. If it works only on a demo, Amazon has bought a services team and a customer list. Antitrust is not the obvious block. Decart is not a cloud. It is not a foundation-model lab on the scale of Anthropic or OpenAI. A software acquisition by AWS is the kind of deal that closes unless a second bidder forces the price up or the diligence that stopped Anthropic stops Amazon too. The Journal’s “coming days” is the window. Another suitor is the risk the same sentence names. What to Watch Whether Amazon or Decart confirms talks, or a price. Any second bidder before a signing. What Anthropic’s diligence actually found, if either side ever says. How Decart’s DOS layer is folded into Trainium’s pitch if a deal closes. The May investors — Sequoia, Benchmark, Radical, Nvidia’s venture arm — and what a $7 billion exit returns them. Amazon is in talks to buy Decart for about $7 billion so developers can move AI jobs between chips. Anthropic looked and left. Nvidia looked earlier. The company was worth $4 billion in May. None of that is a signature. It is a cloud provider trying to buy the reason a customer would try its chip. Digital8Hub will update if the talks produce a deal, a higher bid, or a collapse.