Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, a two-year-old AI startup, for about $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. A deal could come within days if talks hold and no other buyer jumps in. Amazon declined to comment outside business hours, and Decart didn’t respond to requests for comment, The Next Web reported, citing Reuters.
Most people have never heard of Decart. But what it makes goes to the heart of the biggest fight in tech right now: who controls the chips that run AI, and how much everyone else has to pay for them.
What does Decart do?
Decart makes software called DOS that lets companies move their AI models from one kind of chip to another. Normally, tuning a model to run well on a specific processor takes months. Decart says its tools cut that to a couple of weeks, SiliconANGLE reported. That matters when chips are scarce and expensive, because it means a company isn’t stuck with whatever hardware it started on.
Decart also builds its own AI models. One, Lucy, changes live video as it plays. Another, Oasis, creates interactive 3D worlds for video games and for training robots. The company was founded in 2023 by brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, is based in San Francisco with a team in Tel Aviv, and has raised more than $400 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures. It was valued at nearly $4 billion in May.
Why does Amazon want Decart?
Mostly to loosen Nvidia’s grip. Nvidia makes most of the chips the AI industry runs on, and Amazon has spent years building its own alternative, called Trainium, to sell through Amazon Web Services. The hard part isn’t building the chip. It’s getting customers to switch, because their software is built around Nvidia.
Decart is already an Amazon showcase. AWS gave it early access to Trainium chips last year, and Decart’s video model ran live on Trainium3 at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in December 2025. Amazon said then that Decart was “achieving 4x faster frame generation at half the cost of GPUs.” Buying the company would put that switching software in-house.
Who else tried to buy Decart?
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, was in talks this summer to buy Decart for about $6 billion in stock but walked away in September after looking at the books. The founders had also refused Anthropic’s push to move much of the Tel Aviv team to San Francisco, according to The Next Web. Decart’s founders had earlier turned down a higher offer from Nvidia itself. The Israeli business paper Globes reported that a deal at that price would be one of the biggest exits in Israeli tech history, and Calcalist has been tracking the talks closely.
The BeezLoop Take
If you use AI tools at work or pay for them at home, this fight affects your bill. As long as one company makes nearly all the chips, it sets the price. Amazon pushing a real alternative is good for competition, and Microsoft is doing the same with its own Maia chip.
But there’s a catch. Decart’s selling point is that it helps you move between chips freely. Once Amazon owns it, the company has every reason to make that freedom point toward Amazon’s chips and away from everyone else’s. Regulators should ask that question before the deal closes, not after.
The open question: will Decart’s software still work just as well on rival chips once Amazon owns it?
Also on BeezLoop: Qualcomm and Amazon’s multi-year deal to build custom AI data centers, and why 64% of Americans say AI is moving too fast.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, via The Next Web · SiliconANGLE · Calcalist · KING 5 Seattle (video)
