A deal for Decart, a startup that makes software to help AI models run faster on different kinds of chips, would give Amazon new ways of getting more AI developers to use its custom chips instead of Nvidia hardware.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the companies are in talks for an acquisition that could value Decart around $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. Amazon and Decart haven’t confirmed the talks. Amazon hasn’t responded to GeekWire’s request for comment.
A deal of that size would rank among Amazon’s largest. The company paid $13.7 billion for Whole Foods in 2017 and $8.45 billion for MGM in 2022, and in April it agreed to buy Globalstar, a satellite company, for $11.57 billion.
It would also be far larger than the deal that started Amazon’s chip business. Amazon bought Israeli chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015 for a reported $350 million. That team went on to design Trainium and Amazon’s other custom chips, now linchpins of its cloud business.
Decart hasn’t disclosed its revenue but has been profitable almost from the start, according to the business publication Globes. Its customers include eBay, which is also an investor, according to Bloomberg. CTech reported that Decart’s business remains far smaller than the valuation being discussed.
Nvidia dominates the AI chip market in large part because of CUDA, the software that developers have used for years to build and run AI models. Moving that work to other chips, including Amazon’s Trainium, normally takes extra engineering work.
What Decart does: Decart sells software that makes AI models run faster on chips from Nvidia, Google and Amazon, and makes it easier for developers to switch between them, according to the Journal. It licenses that technology to cloud providers and AI labs.
The company also builds its own AI models, including Lucy, which edits live video in real time, and Oasis, which generates interactive virtual worlds. Brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf founded Decart in 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company is based in San Francisco, with a development center in Tel Aviv.
For Amazon, owning Decart could make Trainium an easier sell. Customers with AI models built for Nvidia chips could run them on Trainium with fewer changes, and Amazon would get the engineers behind the technology.
Decart’s software could also help Amazon get more out of the chips it already has. That was Anthropic’s goal in pursuing the startup, according to Bloomberg.
The company’s video models could fit other Amazon businesses, too. Streamers use its technology on Twitch, which Amazon owns. Its Lucy model can show online shoppers how clothes look on them.
Existing ties to AWS: Decart has already moved its own models to Trainium.
At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last December, Decart’s real-time video model turned AWS Senior Vice President Peter DeSantis into a live cartoon of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on the side screens as he opened his keynote. It was a joke about taking over a morning slot that attendees expected Vogels to fill.
When Decart CEO Dean Leitersdorf took the stage later, the model animated him, too, mimicking his movements. The animations were generated live on Trainium3, Amazon’s newest AI chip.
Leitersdorf said the startup worked with AWS to move its models and infrastructure to Trainium. Amazon said that week that Decart was running real-time video four times faster on Trainium at half the cost of GPUs.
Earlier suitors: Amazon isn’t the first company to pursue Decart. Anthropic was in talks to buy the startup for about $6 billion, Bloomberg reported in August, and Nvidia held acquisition talks before that, according to the tech publication CTech.
Nvidia also invested in Decart’s $300 million funding round in May, which valued the startup at about $4 billion.
Anthropic walked away in September after due diligence, Bloomberg reported, adding that the companies may still work together in other ways. Globes, citing sources close to Decart, reported that the founders had refused Anthropic’s push to move much of the company’s team from Tel Aviv to San Francisco.
Anthropic is one of Amazon’s closest AI partners. Amazon has invested about $18 billion in Anthropic and could invest up to $15 billion more as certain milestones are met. Anthropic uses Amazon’s Trainium chips to train and run its Claude models.
Larger industry moves: Amazon isn’t alone in trying to reduce its reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft on Monday unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip, and said it plans to make Maia the main hardware for running AI in its own products starting in 2027.
Google has its TPU chips, and OpenAI has developed a chip with Broadcom.
A deal for Decart could come together soon, according to the Journal, unless talks fall apart or another suitor emerges. One open question is whether Decart’s software would keep supporting Nvidia and Google chips under Amazon ownership.