Amazon reportedly in talks to buy Decart for $7 billion, a bet on the software behind AI chips

Five months ago, Decart raised $300 million and was worth close to $4 billion, according to PitchBook. Amazon may now be willing to pay about $7 billion for it. On Sunday, October 11, The Wall Street Journal reported that the tech giant was negotiating to buy the artificial intelligence startup, citing people familiar with the matter. A deal could come together quickly, the paper said, provided the talks don’t collapse and no rival bidder steps in.

So nothing has been signed. Reuters, which picked up the story, said it could not verify it. Amazon declined to comment outside business hours and Decart did not respond. Two days on, neither company had said anything publicly.

Software that speaks to every chip

Decart was founded in 2023 by chief executive Dean Leitersdorf and product chief Moshe Shalev, both veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s military intelligence unit. According to the business daily Globes, most of its roughly 60 employees were based in Tel Aviv last year, with offices in San Francisco and New York. To the extent the public knows Decart at all, it is for its demos: Oasis, an interactive Minecraft-style world generated frame by frame, and later Lucy, a model that transforms live video, for instance to let shoppers try on clothes virtually.

The real business lies elsewhere, in a less flashy product: the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS. It is a software layer that rewrites how a model runs on a given chip, from compilers down to memory management. It works on Nvidia’s graphics processors, Google’s TPUs and Trainium, Amazon’s in-house chip. The company says it makes models up to eight times faster on the same hardware, a figure no independent party has published. It licenses the technology to cloud providers and AI labs, and says it has been profitable almost from the start.

Why Amazon would pay double

Amazon designs its own chips to lean less on Nvidia, which dominates the market. But a chip is only as good as the software that can exploit it, and that is exactly where Nvidia keeps its lead. Decart is one of the few teams to have shown results on Trainium. The two companies know each other well: in December 2025, Leitersdorf took the stage at Amazon’s re:Invent conference to show Lucy running on Trainium3, the latest generation. “They were among the first in the world to optimize on Trainium3,” Nafea Bshara, vice president at Annapurna Labs, Amazon’s chip design unit, said when the May round was announced.

A takeover would raise an awkward question, though. DOS is valuable because it is neutral: it helps customers move from one chip to another depending on price and availability. In Amazon’s hands, it could become a way to pull those customers towards Trainium. Nvidia, which invested in Decart in May, and Google, whose TPUs it supports, would then be relying on a competitor as a supplier.

Amazon is not the first to take an interest. In August, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic, in which Amazon is one of the largest investors, was discussing a takeover for about $6 billion. According to Bloomberg, the Claude maker walked away last month after examining the company’s books and technology. Its reasons have not been made public. If the $7 billion figure holds, Decart will have more than doubled its value in fourteen months: in August 2025 it raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation.