Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, the AI startup founded by Israeli entrepreneurs, in what could be one of the largest Israeli tech deals of the year. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal values the company at about $7 billion. According to Calcalist, the price is lower, about $5.5 billion. Neither side has announced an agreement.
A long road to Amazon
According to Calcalist, the first talks were with Nvidia, but when the sides were close to an agreement another player entered the picture, and the founders chose to move ahead with it. Nvidia declined to revive the talks, and a month earlier Anthropic also decided not to buy the company. Amazon is already a strategic customer of Decart.
What Decart does
Decart was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who worked together in Unit 8200. The company develops software that makes AI chips run more efficiently, and works on Nvidia processors, Amazon's Trainium chips and Google's TPUs. It also develops models that generate video and virtual worlds in real time. Earlier this year it raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation, led by Radical Ventures.
Why Amazon wants it
Amazon is investing tens of billions of dollars in its own chips, Trainium, to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. Software that improves performance across different chips is a strategic asset at exactly that point. For Israeli tech, it is another huge exit for a very young AI company, less than three years after it was founded.
