Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, an Israeli-founded artificial intelligence startup, in a deal worth more than 9 trillion won.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the 11th, citing people familiar with the matter, that Amazon is discussing a purchase of Decart for $7 billion, or about 9.4 trillion won. A deal could be signed soon unless the talks collapse or another bidder emerges, the people said.
Decart has raised more than $400 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Radical Ventures, according to the market research firm PitchBook. The company was valued at $4 billion as of May.
Decart was founded in San Francisco in 2023 by three Israeli engineers. It is developing world models called Lucy and Oasis that can generate and simulate three-dimensional environments. World models are AI systems that learn the rules of the physical world, such as the laws of physics and spatial structure, to create virtual 3D environments and predict how those environments will change in response to different variables. They are used to train and test robots and self-driving systems in simulation before deployment in the real world, as well as in gaming and video production. The Lucy model can edit live video in real time, while Oasis builds simulation environments for training and testing robotics and autonomous driving systems.
Running AI Models on Any Chip: Amazon Came Away Impressed, WSJ Says
Decart also offers software that allows AI models to run on a range of chips. Existing AI models are built for specific chips and require performance tuning and other work to run elsewhere, a burden the software is designed to remove.
The technology has gained importance recently because surging AI demand has made Nvidia graphics processing units both scarce and expensive. Relying on a single type of chip leaves companies exposed to supply shortages and price increases, so the ability to switch chips flexibly is key to securing computing power reliably and holding down costs. Anthropic was reported in August to be in talks to acquire Decart. Amazon is also said to have taken note. The company has been developing Trainium3, its own custom AI chip, to compete with Nvidia's GPUs. Amazon Web Services officials met Decart's founders, came away impressed and gave the startup early access to Trainium3 in 2025, the Journal reported.
Trainium, the AI training chip Amazon introduced in 2020, is now used through AWS by customers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Uber. In April, Amazon said revenue commitments tied to Trainium had surpassed $225 billion. The company is also working to sell the chips directly to other companies' data centers, expanding beyond offering them as part of its cloud service. Google and Microsoft are likewise accelerating development of their own chips to replace Nvidia's GPUs. Google said in April that it would let some customers use its Tensor Processing Units in their own data centers.
Amazon's other large acquisitions in recent years include the $6.5 billion purchase of the MGM film and television studio in 2022 and the $1.1 billion acquisition of Globalstar announced earlier this year.
