Amazon is in advanced negotiations to acquire Decart, an artificial intelligence startup whose software helps developers run AI models across different kinds of computer chips, in a deal worth about $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. The talks are far along but not finished, and either side could still walk away.
Neither company has confirmed the negotiations. Amazon declined to comment, and Decart did not respond to requests for comment, according to the Journal's report.
A $7 billion price would mark a sharp jump in Decart's valuation. The company was valued at nearly $4 billion in May, when it raised $300 million in a funding round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia joining as a new investor, according to PitchBook data. In total, Decart has raised more than $400 million from venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures since its founding in 2023.
Decart was started in San Francisco by a team of Israeli engineers and focuses on a corner of AI that has become a bottleneck for the industry: the software that lets AI models run on hardware they were not originally built for. Most AI models are designed around specific chips and need expensive reworking to run on anything else. Decart's software is meant to remove that burden, letting a model move between chip types without the usual performance tuning.
The company has also built two AI models that have drawn industry attention. One, called Lucy, can edit live video in real time. The other, called Oasis, generates simulated 3D environments used to train and test robots and self-driving systems before they are deployed in the real world. Such "world models," which learn the rules of the physical world to create virtual environments, are considered a key building block for robotics and autonomous vehicles.
The acquisition talks come after at least two earlier suitors moved on. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, explored buying Decart in August for a potential $6 billion but decided not to proceed after conducting due diligence, Bloomberg News reported last month. Before that, Decart's founders turned down an acquisition offer from Nvidia, the dominant maker of AI chips.
For Amazon, buying Decart would fit a broader pattern of heavy AI spending. The company's cloud division competes directly with Microsoft and Google for AI workloads, and owning software that frees AI models from dependence on any single chip could give it an edge with corporate customers. If the deal closes at the reported price, it would sit among Amazon's largest acquisitions in recent years, alongside its 2022 purchase of the MGM film studio for about $6.5 billion and its announced acquisition this year of Globalstar for roughly $11 billion.
The timing also matters for Wall Street. Amazon is one of several big banks and tech companies set to report quarterly earnings this week, and investors will be watching for how much the largest cloud providers plan to keep spending on AI infrastructure as the arms race with Microsoft and Google continues. Deals of this size suggest that, for now, the answer is: a great deal.
Another factor in Decart's favor is momentum. Chip-portability software has grown more valuable as companies try to avoid depending on a single chip supplier, and Decart is one of the few startups to build a product around that problem before the giants did. That head start helps explain why Amazon is reportedly willing to pay a premium.
Like many recent AI deals, the talks have not crossed the finish line yet, and big technology acquisitions are drawing closer regulatory attention. But the reported price alone shows how much value the industry now places on software that makes AI cheaper and more flexible to run — a prize Amazon apparently wants for itself.