Amazon may pay billions for AI startup Decart

Where the talks stand

According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, a startup that sells software to help AI models run faster on different kinds of chips. The report says a deal could value Decart at around $7 billion. Neither Amazon nor Decart has confirmed the talks.

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. 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.

Why it matters for Amazon

NVIDIA's dominance in the AI chip market is largely attributed to CUDA, the software developers have used for years. Moving that work to Amazon's Trainium chips normally takes extra engineering effort. Decart's software could ease that transition and help Amazon get more out of the chips it already has.

Company background

Decart was founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf with Moshe Shalev. It is based in San Francisco, with a development center in Tel Aviv. The company hasn't disclosed its revenue but has been profitable almost from the start, according to Globes. Its customers include eBay, which is also an investor.

Earlier suitors

Amazon isn't the first company to pursue Decart. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in talks to buy the startup for about $6 billion, and CTech reported that NVIDIA held acquisition talks before that and also invested in Decart's $300 million funding round. Last December, Decart ran its real-time video model live on Trainium3 at AWS re:Invent.