Amazon wants Decart, and it’s willing to pay roughly $7 billion for it. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the ecommerce giant is in advanced talks to acquire the Israeli-founded AI startup, citing people familiar with the matter — a deal that would be one of the largest Israeli tech exits ever and one of Amazon’s biggest acquisitions in recent memory. The talks are advanced enough that a deal could come together soon, the Journal said, but nothing is signed and the negotiations could still collapse.
Amazon declined to comment, and Decart didn’t respond to requests for comment, according to Reuters.
Here’s what the number tells you: Decart was valued at nearly $4 billion in May, PitchBook data cited by the Journal shows. Paying $7 billion five months later is a 75% markup for a three-year-old company. That’s the going rate in 2026 for software that touches both AI chips and world models.
Decart is not Anthropic’s leftovers
The Amazon talks didn’t come out of nowhere. Decart has been the industry’s most-shopped acquisition target for months. Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic explored buying the company for a potential $6 billion in August, then walked away in September after due diligence. Before that, Decart’s founders turned down an acquisition offer from Nvidia, preferring Anthropic’s approach, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Each failed deal raised the price. Anthropic’s bid went in at $6 billion. Amazon is reportedly talking $7 billion.
Founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, Decart operates out of San Francisco and has raised more than $400 million from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Radical Ventures. Its May funding round raised $300 million, led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor — the same round that set the $4 billion valuation.
The chip angle matters most
Decart’s headline products are its world models. Lucy, backed by Nvidia, edits live video in real time. Oasis generates simulated 3D environments that train and test robots and self-driving systems before they touch the real world. It’s the kind of technology that shows up in gaming, video production, and physical AI alike.
But the piece Amazon probably cares about most is quieter: software that lets developers move AI workloads between chips from different vendors with minimal friction. Most AI models are built for specific chips and need expensive re-engineering to run anywhere else. Decart’s software promises to remove that tax.
That matters because Amazon has spent years trying to break Nvidia’s grip on AI compute. Its custom Trainium chips compete directly with Nvidia’s GPUs, and Amazon’s cloud arm gave Decart early access to Trainium3 in 2025 after meeting the startup and coming away impressed, the Journal reported. Buying Decart would hand Amazon a software layer designed to bridge its own silicon and customer workloads — and, just as usefully, a product that makes it easier for developers to leave Nvidia’s ecosystem.
World models matter too, though. Amazon’s robotics ambitions — warehouse automation, delivery, Ring and its home-robotics bets — all run through simulation before they run anywhere else. Oasis fits that pipeline neatly.
$7 billion is a statement, not a bargain
If the deal closes at the reported price, it would surpass Amazon’s $6.5 billion purchase of MGM in 2022, making it one of the company’s largest acquisitions — though still below the roughly $11 billion Globalstar deal Amazon announced this year. For Israeli tech, it would rank among the biggest exits ever.
The premium also says something about the state of the market. When a company can raise its price from $4 billion to $7 billion in five months without shipping a new product, acquirers aren’t paying for revenue. They’re paying for position in a compute war.
Don’t count the deal done yet. The Journal’s own reporting stresses that another suitor could emerge — and given how many companies have already circled Decart, that’s not idle boilerplate. Amazon’s talks come after two collapsed deals, and a third collapsing wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen in this market this month.
Why this matters
This deal is about the deepest fault line in AI right now: who controls the stack between the chips and the models. Nvidia dominates the hardware; the hyperscalers — Amazon, Google, Microsoft — are spending billions to route around it with their own silicon. Decart’s portability software is one of the few independent assets that works across all of it, which is exactly why everyone from Nvidia to Anthropic to Amazon has tried to buy it. Whoever owns it gets a say in which chips AI developers can actually use.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal (via Reuters), Bloomberg News, The Jerusalem Post
Frequently asked questions
Is Amazon buying Decart?
Not yet. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Amazon is in advanced talks to acquire Decart for about $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal isn’t finalized and could still fall apart, or another suitor could emerge.
Why does Amazon want Decart?
Decart makes chip-portability software that lets developers move AI workloads between chip vendors, plus world models called Lucy and Oasis for real-time video editing and simulated environments. For Amazon, it would strengthen its custom Trainium chips against Nvidia’s GPUs.
What happened to Anthropic’s bid for Decart?
Anthropic explored a potential $6 billion acquisition in August and walked away in September after due diligence, Bloomberg News reported. Decart’s founders had earlier rejected an acquisition offer from Nvidia, according to The Jerusalem Post.
What is Decart’s Lucy model?
Lucy is a Decart AI model that can edit live video in real time. Oasis, its sibling model, generates interactive 3D simulation environments used to train and test robots and autonomous-driving systems.