The Wall Street Journal reported exclusively on Sunday evening that Amazon is in talks to buy Decart at a valuation of around seven billion dollars. According to the paper’s sources, the deal could be done within days, assuming the talks hold and no other bidder shows up.
The interesting bit is in the subordinate clause: Anthropic was already there, and said no.
What DOS does
Decart is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers - brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf plus Moshe Shalev - and builds software called DOS. It optimizes a neural network for one specific processor.
Every AI project has to do that step, and until now it was expensive: months of work to land a model on a chip. DOS compresses that into a couple of weeks, SiliconANGLE reports. The real payoff isn’t the time, it’s the mobility. With DOS you can move workloads to other processors when your requirements shift or a chip simply isn’t available.
Decart also builds its own models on the side, the world models Lucy and Oasis, which generate three-dimensional environments for games and robot training.
Anthropic ran due diligence and walked
In May, Decart raised 300 million dollars at a four billion valuation, taking its total past 400 million, from backers including Radical Ventures, Nvidia Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Sequoia and Benchmark.
In September it was Anthropic at the table, reportedly at six billion dollars according to Bloomberg. After due diligence, Anthropic pulled out. Nobody is saying why.
Which is striking, because Anthropic is fighting for compute on every front right now - October brought the story of how co-founder Tom Brown secured $1.25 billion a month of SpaceX capacity. A company that makes exactly that problem smaller was on the table and didn’t get bought.
Trainium3 explains why Amazon is paying
For AWS, Decart is an obvious fit. Amazon builds its own AI processors, Trainium3 for training, and every in-house chip needs customers who can actually get their models onto it. Decart had early access to Trainium3 last year, SiliconANGLE reports, after a meeting with senior AWS engineers who came away impressed by the founders.
So what’s being bought here isn’t just software. It’s the tool that gets customers off Nvidia.
Portability is the scarce thing
This is the second time it has shown up this weekend. Palantir’s CTO said on Sunday that sovereignty means being able to switch models. Amazon is now paying seven billion for the ability to switch chips.
Same bet both times: the scarce thing is neither the model nor the processor, it’s the layer that makes both interchangeable. Anthropic looked at that layer and kept its money. With a billion dollars between the two offers, I’d like to know what the due diligence turned up.