Amazon in Talks to Buy Decart for About $7 Billion

Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, the Israeli artificial intelligence startup behind a set of real-time video and world models, in a deal that could be worth around $7 billion. The talks were reported by the Wall Street Journal and summarised by Bloomberg on October 11, which cautioned that the purchase could close soon if the negotiations do not fall apart. Nothing has been signed, and both the price and the structure could still move.

If it holds, the deal would be one of the larger acquisitions of an AI company this year, and it would hand Amazon a team whose work sits in two areas it cares about: squeezing more out of its own silicon, and building models that generate and edit video in real time.

What Decart actually builds

Decart was founded by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. Its public models include Lucy, described as a real-time video and world-editing model, and Oasis, a real-time world model aimed at physical AI and robotics. Alongside those, the company sells optimisation software that it says can run AI models up to eight times faster on the same hardware, including Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon's own Trainium chips.

That efficiency pitch is the part most relevant to Amazon. The company has spent years trying to make Trainium a credible alternative to Nvidia hardware for its cloud customers, and software that wrings more speed out of the same chips is worth a great deal when compute is the binding constraint on the whole industry.

A company that has been circled before

Decart has been the subject of takeover reporting since the summer. Earlier this year it raised roughly $300 million at a valuation close to $4 billion, with Nvidia among its backers. In August, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was weighing a deal of about $6 billion, later put nearer $7 billion by Israeli outlets, mostly in Anthropic shares. The founders were said to have favoured Anthropic even though Nvidia had offered a higher number.

That deal did not happen. In September, Anthropic walked away after due diligence, though the two companies left the door open to a commercial partnership. Amazon's reported interest is the next chapter rather than the first. It is worth remembering that Amazon is already one of Anthropic's largest investors, which makes the competition for the same small startup a little tangled.

For readers tracking where the money is going, Decart fits a pattern we have followed in the AMD acquisition of World Labs and in the wider surge in AI venture funding through the third quarter: the biggest companies are paying up for teams that own world models or make existing hardware go further. The same hunger shows in Anthropic's own compute commitments.

Treat it as talks, not a done deal

A few cautions are in order. This is reporting of negotiations, not an announced agreement, and acquisitions at this size collapse over price, regulatory worry or a change of heart. Both companies have declined to comment in the reporting so far. If a deal is signed, the interesting questions will be what happens to Decart's hardware-agnostic software once it sits inside a company that sells its own chips, and whether regulators take an interest in yet another large AI tie-up. For now, the only firm fact is that Decart is being fought over, again.