WSJ: Amazon in talks to buy Decart for about $7 billion, a month after Anthropic walked away at $6 billion; neither company has confirmed

Why it matters

【Key points】

The Wall Street Journal reported exclusively on October 11, citing people familiar with the matter, that Amazon is in talks to acquire AI startup Decart in a deal that could value it at around $7 billion; a deal could come soon if talks hold. Reuters said it could not verify the report; Amazon and Decart did not respond to requests for comment.

Founded in 2023 in Israel, Decart is best known for Lucy, a real-time video editing model, and Oasis, which generates simulated environments for robotics and autonomous-driving tests. It raised $300 million in May in a round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia joining, at a valuation near $4 billion.

【Verifiable】

Bloomberg reported on September 7 that Anthropic, which had explored buying Decart for about $6 billion since August, walked away after due diligence; neither side gave a reason, and Globes said one sticking point was Anthropic's demand that core staff move from Tel Aviv to San Francisco. Per Bloomberg, Anthropic's interest was Decart's stack for getting more out of chips in training and inference, not its video models. Decart has announced it is optimizing Lucy on Amazon's Trainium chips and offering it on Amazon Bedrock; CEO Dean Leitersdorf told Calcalist that Lucy peaked at 26 frames per second on GPUs and nears 101 on Trainium.

【Our read】

This is our judgment. 1. Amazon would be buying less a video product than a team that makes models run fast on non-Nvidia silicon. Trainium's weak spot has been software, and Decart is one of few customers publicly showing Trainium beating GPUs.

2. Anthropic passed after diligence while Amazon may pay more, which suggests different math: Anthropic weighed fit with its own compute stack, Amazon weighs chip and cloud sales. Amazon is also a major Anthropic investor and compute supplier, so the work could indirectly serve Anthropic.

3. Until a signed deal is announced, price and terms may change; rely on official statements.