Amazon in talks to buy AI startup Decart for $7B, WSJ says

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↗ 3.29% is negotiating to buy Decart, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, in a deal that could be valued at around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal News Corp ↗ 0.28% reported on Sunday, October 11, citing people familiar with the matter. According to the Journal, the purchase could be completed soon if talks don't fall apart. No final agreement has been announced. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report.marketscreener+1

A deal would give Amazon software that lets developers move AI workloads between different chips more easily. That ability matters more as cloud providers try to get customers onto their own chips instead of relying on Nvidia ↘ 0.52% alone.barrons

A price well above Decart's last valuation

Decart raised \$300 million in May at a valuation of about \$4 billion, so a \$7 billion price would be a large premium on that funding round. Radical Ventures led the round, according to RuntimeWire.tokenpost+1

Brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf founded the company in 2023 together with Moshe Shalev. All three are Israeli engineers.news.bloomberglaw

Earlier suitors dropped out

Amazon is not the first company to look at buying Decart. In August, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in talks to buy the company for about \$6 billion. It would have been the Claude maker's largest known acquisition, and Decart's team was expected to join Anthropic's inference and performance group. Anthropic carried out due diligence but decided in September not to go ahead with the purchase.fortune+2

Before that, the Israeli outlet Calcalist reported that Decart had been in advanced talks with Nvidia. Those talks collapsed after higher offers came in, according to Calcalist, and Amazon, Nebius ↗ 0.62% and SpaceX were named as possible buyers. Elon Musk later said SpaceX would not buy Decart.calcalistech

What it could mean for AWS

Amazon already uses Decart's technology. Calcalist reported that Decart first ran its software mostly on Nvidia GPUs and has since been working more closely with Amazon. RuntimeWire said the deal raises a question for Amazon Web Services: whether owning a tool that works across chips would help sell its Trainium processors, or make it harder to market the tool as neutral across hardware.runtimewire+1