Analysis
Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, an AI startup whose software makes AI models run faster on different chips, in a deal that could value Decart at around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on October 11. Amazon and Decart didn't respond to WSJ's requests for comment.
A Deal Anthropic Already Walked Away From
This isn't the first time a buyer has circled Decart. Anthropic explored acquiring the company in August in a deal that could have been worth about $6 billion, then dropped the pursuit in September after due diligence, Bloomberg reported. Neither report details what Anthropic found -- or didn't find -- that killed its interest, which is itself the open question behind Amazon's reported price coming in a billion dollars higher.
“Decart last raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures on May 18, with Nvidia joining as a new investor, according to the same report.”
Decart's pitch is speed: software that lets existing AI models run faster across different chips, rather than a model or chip of its own. That makes it a bet on the inference layer -- the part of the AI stack that runs models in production rather than trains them -- where Together AI, Fireworks AI, Baseten and Groq are all chasing similar customers with different approaches, from custom silicon to optimized serving stacks. Decart last raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures on May 18, with Nvidia joining as a new investor, according to the same report.
What A $7B Price Would Actually Mean
Jumping from a $300 million round in May to a reported $7 billion acquisition price five months later is the kind of number that invites skepticism before it invites applause. Acquisition talk is not an acquisition: Amazon has walked away from large AI deals before signing, and Anthropic's own reported interest collapsed after a closer look -- the real risk for anyone repeating the $7 billion figure is treating an unconfirmed report as a done deal. If the number holds, it would be one of the largest AI acquisitions of the year outside the foundation-model labs themselves; if it doesn't, it joins a growing list of reported AI deal talks that make headlines without changing anyone's cap table.
Pulse has previously covered Amazon's data-center and AI-infrastructure spending; a Decart deal would be its first large AI-model-optimization acquisition in that run. For founders building inference infrastructure, the read is that the biggest cloud platforms now see enough value in chip-agnostic speed software to pay founder-round-defining prices for it, even unproven. However, until either side confirms, the $7 billion number remains exactly that -- reported, not closed, and priced above a figure a more cautious acquirer already walked away from.
