Amazon in Talks to Buy Decart at About $7 Billion After Anthropic Walked From a $6 Billion Deal

Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, a San Francisco-based AI startup, at a potential valuation of about $7 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Monday that cited people familiar with the matter. The discussions remain at a negotiation stage, but the report noted that if they progress smoothly and no rival bidder emerges, a deal could be reached relatively quickly.

The price under discussion would represent a steep jump from Decart's last known valuation. PitchBook data shows the company has raised more than $400 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures, and its May 2026 funding round valued it at close to $4 billion. A $7 billion exit price would mean roughly an 80 percent premium in under six months.

Decart was founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf together with Moshe Shalev, and it made its name with real-time generative "world models" such as Oasis and Lucy, which can simulate interactive environments and live video frame by frame. Alongside the research models, the company develops optimization software that helps AI workloads run across different chip architectures, letting developers switch between AI accelerators without rewriting their stack.

That cross-chip capability is a large part of why the deal matters. As hyperscalers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI compute, software that reduces dependence on any single chip vendor has become strategically valuable, and it is exactly the layer Amazon has an incentive to own as it builds out Trainium-based infrastructure for AWS.

Amazon would not be the first giant to circle the company. Bloomberg reported in August that Anthropic had held acquisition talks with Decart at a valuation of roughly $6 billion, and by September reporting indicated Anthropic had abandoned the pursuit. A completed Amazon deal would therefore also read as a competitive move against the very AI labs its cloud business supplies.

The episode fits a broader pattern in this cycle: rather than waiting for startups to IPO, large buyers are moving earlier and paying premiums for teams that sit close to the compute layer. For Decart's investors, an exit at nearly twice the May valuation within half a year would be one of the faster markups of 2026.

Neither Amazon nor Decart has commented publicly on the talks, and the WSJ notes that details could still change or the negotiations could fall apart. But the reported structure, a direct acquisition rather than a licensing arrangement, suggests Amazon wants the technology and the team inside the company, not just as a partner.