Amazon in talks to buy Decart for $7 billion after Anthropic walked away in September
The Wall Street Journal reported on October 11, 2026 that Amazon is in advanced negotiations to acquire the startup Decart at a valuation of around $7 billion. The deal could be signed quickly, but it is not final — and only a couple of months earlier, Anthropic withdrew from a similar acquisition of roughly $6 billion after due diligence. Neither party has confirmed the negotiations.
What has been reported
The Wall Street Journal wrote on October 11, citing sources familiar with the matter, that Amazon is in talks to buy the AI startup Decart in a deal "that could be valued at around $7 billion" (Straits Times/Reuters). According to the report, the talks are advanced and a deal could be signed soon — but it is not final, and there remains a possibility that negotiations collapse or that another buyer emerges (Jerusalem Post/MSN).
Neither Amazon nor Decart has confirmed anything. Reuters could not verify the report; Amazon declined to comment outside regular business hours, and Decart did not respond to inquiries. It is worth noting that all available coverage of the story is secondary relaying of the WSJ report — the original Journal article lies behind this coverage.
What kind of company Decart is
Decart was founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with major research and development operations in Tel Aviv, Israel — which would make an acquisition one of the largest Israeli technology exits ever (Yahoo Finance/Stocktwits).
The company has raised more than $400 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures (Jerusalem Post/MSN). In May of this year it raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia as a new investor, at a valuation of nearly $4 billion, according to PitchBook data cited by the WSJ (Straits Times/Reuters). An acquisition at $7 billion would nearly double that May valuation.
Technologically, Decart has two main products: Lucy, a model that can edit live video in real time, according to the company's website, and Oasis, a model that generates simulated environments for training and testing robotic systems and self-driving cars (Straits Times/Reuters). In addition, the company develops software that makes it easier to run AI models on different chip platforms — and it is this capability that has received the most attention in coverage.
The buyer trail: Nvidia, Anthropic, Amazon
The story of who has tried to buy Decart is itself a story worth telling. According to the Jerusalem Post/MSN coverage — which is not attributed to a named original outlet and should therefore be treated cautiously — the founders previously rejected an acquisition offer from Nvidia, preferring a bid from Anthropic made in stock (Jerusalem Post/MSN).
Anthropic explored a deal of around $6 billion in August, according to Bloomberg News via Reuters (Straits Times/Reuters). In September, the company decided after due diligence not to pursue the acquisition. Barely a month later, Amazon took over the track. The string of suitors — Nvidia invested in the May round and has, according to the Jerusalem Post coverage, previously tried to buy the company, Anthropic withdrew in September, and Amazon is now negotiating — shows, in the analysis of the coverage outlets, how fiercely competition for flexible chip capacity and expertise in simulated environments has become.
Why Decart fits Amazon
The core argument concerns chip portability. AI models are typically built for a specific chip and require performance tuning to run on another — a burden Decart's software is designed to ease, according to Seoul Economic Daily. This technology has grown in importance as demand for AI capacity has made Nvidia's GPUs harder to obtain; for companies, the ability to choose among different chip platforms provides flexibility against supply shortages and price increases.
There is also a concrete connection between the companies: back in 2025, Amazon's cloud division AWS gave Decart early access to Trainium3, Amazon's in-house AI chip, after a meeting with the startup's founders that, according to the Journal, made an impression (Yahoo Finance/Stocktwits). An acquisition would, as Business Standard writes in its analysis of the WSJ report, give Amazon technology that helps developers run AI workloads on different chip platforms — a capability that could become increasingly important as technology companies seek alternatives to Nvidia's processors.
It should be emphasized that this link between chip portability and the price is analysis in the secondary coverage — not a confirmed rationale from Amazon or Decart.
Market reaction and comparisons
Amazon's stock rose 0.4 percent in overnight trading on Sunday after the report, with "bullish" sentiment among retail investors, according to Stocktwits via Yahoo Finance.
If the deal goes through at the reported value, it would become one of the largest in Israeli tech history and one of Amazon's largest acquisitions in recent years, comparable to the acquisition of MGM studios in 2022 for around $6.5 billion and this year's announced acquisition of Globalstar for approximately $11 billion, according to the Jerusalem Post coverage (Jerusalem Post/MSN).
Open questions
The most important caveat stands unchanged: no deal has been confirmed. The negotiations could fall apart, or another buyer could emerge — the report explicitly states both possibilities. The founders' reported rejection of Nvidia's bid rests on a single secondary source without clear attribution. And the precise rationale for a price nearly double the May valuation is partly interpretation from the coverage, not an official position from the parties. Until a deal is signed and confirmed, this is a picture of a fast-moving negotiation process — not a completed transaction.