Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, a fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI) company. According to the WSJ, Amazon is planning to buy the company in a $7 billion deal, marking a big jump from its last funding round in May, which valued it at $4 billion.
Neither side has confirmed the deal, and according to the WSJ, talks could still fall apart or another suitor can come up.
The company has been growing fast, helped by the adequate capital from top venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Radical Ventures, Zeev Ventures, Nvidia, and Toyota Ventures.
Decart is creating software that makes it easier for developers to switch between different AI chips, a capability that has become more popular this year. It is also known for models that generate interactive video and simulated environments as one interacts with them. These models are known as Lucy and Oasis.
The potential acquisition comes a few months after Amazon Web Services gave Decart an early access to its Tranium chip. It was highly impressed by the founders, according to the WSJ.
The report comes at a time when Amazon is aiming to become a major player in various areas in the AI space. It is one of the biggest shareholders in Anthropic, a company that will launch an IPO at a $2 trillion valuation.
It has also built Tranium, its chips that it hopes will be bigger competitors to those made by Nvidia. Most importantly, Amazon is becoming a major infrastructure provider for companies in the AI industry. It is in the process of spending $220 billion in capital expenditure this year.
The report also comes at a time when large companies are scooping promising AI startups. As we reported earlier, Nvidia is in talks to acquire Reflection AI, a company that makes open-source AI models. If the deal goes through, it will be the biggest one it has executed. It recently announced a plan to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion.
SpaceX recently acquired Cursor for $60 billion. Meta Platforms also made a bid for Manus, before abandoning it amid regulatory concerns. AMD recently acquired World Labs for $8.2 billion, while Stripe acquired OpenRouter for $7.2 billion.