Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is negotiating an acquisition that could give its cloud business control of software designed to make artificial intelligence run across competing chips. The company is in talks to buy Decart for around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on October 11, citing people familiar with the matter.
The negotiations could produce an agreement soon, but could also collapse or be interrupted by another bidder, according to the Journal’s report. No completed acquisition has been announced in the reporting reviewed for this article. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report.
Decart has two sides to its business: infrastructure software for running AI efficiently, and models that generate or transform video in real time. The distinction helps explain why the reported discussions are about more than buying another consumer-facing AI application. Its software layer operates closer to the computing hardware on which those applications depend.
The startup calls that layer the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS. In its product descriptions, Decart says the stack is built across Nvidia hardware, AWS Trainium and Google’s tensor processing units. It markets the technology to hardware providers and AI teams seeking faster execution, lower costs and higher utilisation. Those are company claims, not performance results independently established by The Eastern Herald.
For a prospective buyer, the strategic question is whether that software can make more of the installed computing capacity useful. Buying a chip and getting an AI workload to run efficiently on it are different tasks. Decart’s stated proposition is to work across that gap, offering an optimisation layer rather than requiring every customer to build one from scratch for each hardware platform.
Amazon has its own stake in that problem through AWS Trainium, its custom AI chips. The Journal’s reporting, as described by other publications, says AWS gave Decart early access to Trainium3 in 2025 after meeting the startup’s founders. That reported relationship predates the acquisition discussions and places the two companies’ contact in a hardware-development context.
It does not, however, establish that a purchase would make Decart exclusive to Amazon chips. Decart currently presents its stack as spanning several hardware families. The acquisition reporting does not specify whether those relationships would continue, whether the software would remain available to competitors, or how it would be offered to AWS customers.
The model business adds a different capability. Lucy transforms live video, with Decart describing applications in virtual try-on, advertising, social platforms and gaming. Oasis generates interactive environments that the company says are designed for robotics, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing and drones. These products target systems that must respond as events happen, rather than only producing a finished clip after a user submits a request.
The models and infrastructure are connected in Decart’s own account of its business: Lucy and Oasis are powered by DOS. That gives the startup both software intended to improve computation and applications that use it. The public descriptions do not establish how much revenue each product contributes, what customers pay, or the financial assumptions underpinning Amazon’s reported interest.
The potential price would be substantially above Decart’s most recently reported fundraising valuation. The Journal put that valuation at nearly $4 billion in May, citing PitchBook. A Reuters dispatch carried by KSL said Decart raised $300 million that month in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor. A private funding valuation and an acquisition price are different measures; the larger headline figure does not disclose what individual shareholders would receive.
Anthropic had previously explored buying Decart in a potential $6 billion transaction. The Reuters dispatch, citing Bloomberg News, said the Claude developer decided in September not to pursue the acquisition after due diligence. The report did not establish why that examination ended the talks. It would be speculation to treat the earlier withdrawal as proof of a technical or financial problem.
The same dispatch said Amazon declined to comment outside regular business hours and Decart did not respond to requests for comment. Those were the responses reported by Reuters, not the outcome of requests made by The Eastern Herald. No payment structure, integration plan or closing timetable is established in the sources reviewed.
The remaining question is what Amazon would buy and how it would deploy it. Decart’s cross-chip software could support a broader cloud-computing strategy, while its live-video and simulation models offer a separate product opportunity. Until an agreement is announced, those remain possible uses of the technology, not commitments by Amazon. The reported $7 billion discussions should be read as negotiations over an AI infrastructure company, not as a completed takeover.
