Amazon in talks to acquire Decart in reported $7 billion deal

On Sunday, October 11, 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was in talks to acquire Decart for approximately $7 billion. People familiar with the matter said the discussions could produce an agreement soon. The same sources cautioned that the talks could still collapse, or that another contender could appear before anything was finalized. Amazon did not confirm the report. Decart did not confirm it. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the details.

The opening Amazon moved toward had appeared only the month before. In September 2026, after completing due diligence—the full review of finances, technology, and risk that precedes a large acquisition—Anthropic withdrew from an exploration that had valued Decart at about $6 billion. Some reports had placed that earlier figure as high as $7 billion. Advanced negotiations ended without a purchase. The reasons for the withdrawal were not publicly established.

Brothers Dean Leitersdorf, with co-founder Moshe Shalev, had already chosen Anthropic’s offer over Nvidia’s higher bid. Nvidia had moved first, reached exclusive negotiations, and come close to completing a purchase. Those talks collapsed once a bigger offer emerged. Anthropic became the preferred bidder, and the two sides spent weeks trading drafts of an acquisition agreement. The three Israeli engineers sat at the center of that scramble. When Anthropic stepped away, what they had built over three years still had no final buyer.

Founded in 2023, the startup had raised approximately $450 million in total. In May 2026 it raised $300 million. Radical Ventures led the round. Nvidia joined as an investor. The financing valued the company at nearly $4 billion.

Its software was pitched to ease the movement of AI workloads across chips from different manufacturers. A developer could take a model running on one processor and shift it to another, a practical way to pull more work from hardware already in hand. The same platform carried Lucy, a system for real-time video editing and world-model work, and Oasis, which generated simulated environments used in robotics and autonomous-driving training. Three years had produced both a portability layer for expensive compute and tools that could simulate the physical world for machines still learning to move through it.

Decart’s claim for its core software is blunt. DOS, the Decart Optimization Stack, delivers over 1,600 tokens per second for agentic workloads. The industry average sits near 200. A token is a small unit of text or data that a model processes; agentic workloads are the multi-step jobs in which software agents plan, call tools, and act without constant human direction. The company places that speed more than eight times ordinary performance on the same class of work.

Amazon Web Services had already met Decart’s founders. The meetings left AWS impressed. In 2025 the cloud division granted the startup early access to Trainium3. Trainium3 was Amazon’s third-generation custom AI chip, developed to compete with Nvidia, which continued to dominate the market for graphics processing units, the specialized chips powering the AI boom. AWS already sold on-demand computing capacity on a metered basis to developers and enterprises. Custom silicon brought Amazon-designed processors into that same catalog, so customers could run AI workloads on hardware built inside the company rather than renting only outside chips through the cloud. Early access put Decart’s software onto Trainium3 while both sides still operated as separate firms. The code had been tested inside Amazon’s own compute ecosystem.

That prior relationship shaped the logic of a purchase. Software that helped models run efficiently across processors from different manufacturers could make the AWS platform more attractive to customers who wanted flexibility across hardware. An acquisition would also give Amazon direct control of technology already running on its silicon. The custom chip, the cloud that delivered it, and the optimization layer between model and processor would sit under one roof.

Amazon was already bolting agent-style systems onto its own businesses. Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, described the merchant side of the effort the month before the Decart talks surfaced. “We've gone from a smaller set of capabilities to onboarding just hundreds of them,” she said. Seller Assistant had shifted from answering questions toward reasoning across inventory, pricing, advertising, demand and compliance, remembering how a merchant operates, monitoring the business, and taking action when granted permission. The expansion sat apart from any acquisition discussion; it simply showed how far Amazon had already carried agent tooling into the daily running of its marketplace.

The reported $7 billion price would rank among Amazon’s larger recent purchases. The company acquired MGM for $6.5 billion in 2022. Earlier in 2026 it announced an approximately $11 billion deal for Globalstar.

Accounts of the sale process had also linked SpaceX to interest in the company. Elon Musk answered those reports in two words. They are “fake news,” he said. Nebius, a Netherlands-based neocloud operator, had been tied to earlier approaches as well. Coverage carried the additional names beside Amazon’s reported pursuit, still open and still able to fall apart before any signature.