Amazon in Talks to Buy AI Startup Decart for $7 Billion, After Nvidia and Anthropic Walked Away

Amazon is negotiating to acquire Decart, a Tel Aviv startup building real-time video and "world model" AI, at a valuation of roughly $7 billion — weeks after Nvidia and then Anthropic walked away from deals for the same company.

Amazon is in negotiations to acquire Decart, a Tel Aviv startup building real-time video and "world model" AI, in a deal that could value the company at around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The purchase could wrap up soon if the talks do not collapse, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. Amazon has not confirmed the talks.

The reported price is a sharp step up from the roughly $4 billion valuation Decart carried after a funding round led by Radical Ventures just months earlier. But what makes the deal notable is who did not sign first.

Decart spent the summer being courted by some of the biggest names in AI — and watching them walk away. Nvidia, already an investor in the company, reportedly entered exclusive talks to buy it outright; those talks ended when a larger offer arrived. The founders then chose Anthropic over Nvidia's bid, and the two sides spent weeks drafting an acquisition agreement worth roughly $6 billion to $7 billion, paid mostly in Anthropic stock. In early September, Anthropic walked away after completing due diligence.

Founded in 2023 by Israeli engineers — brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev — Decart is not a video-generation novelty act. Its core product is DOS, the Decart Optimization Stack, an inference and training platform that the company says delivers more than 1,600 tokens per second for agentic workloads, against an industry average closer to 200. On top of it sit Lucy, a real-time world model for virtual try-on and live video transformation, and Oasis, a world model built for physical AI and robotics.

That speed is the pitch. Most generative video tools return a clip minutes later; Decart's software reacts while a user is still interacting with it — the difference between a demo and something you could bolt onto a game engine, a robotics stack or a livestream today. It is the same capability AWS has been chasing as it races to build generative features into Alexa+ and its Rufus shopping assistant.

Amazon is not the only company that has circled. SpaceX and the Netherlands-based cloud operator Nebius have both been linked to interest in Decart, though Elon Musk publicly dismissed reports that SpaceX was negotiating as "fake news." The collapse of Anthropic's move may also have had its own logic: Bloomberg has reported that Anthropic is targeting an IPO before Thanksgiving, which could make carrying an unresolved multibillion-dollar acquisition awkward for a company about to face public shareholders. For now, the talks remain unconfirmed — and, as Decart's summer showed, nothing is signed until it is signed.

Sources: The Business Times, KSL, Startup Fortune