Amazon–Decart acquisition: tracking deal progress and approvals

What happened

Amazon is in active negotiations to acquire the Israeli AI startup Decart for approximately $7 billion 15. Reports on October 11, 2026, indicate an agreement could be finalized within days, though sources familiar with the matter noted that talks could still collapse or another buyer could emerge 15. The startup was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev 12.

The potential transaction follows a $300 million strategic partnership formed in May 2026 5. Decart reached a valuation of nearly $4 billion that same month during a funding round led by Radical Ventures, which included participation from Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Adobe Ventures 1. Prior to Amazon's current bid, Anthropic abandoned a $6 billion acquisition attempt in September 2026 after conducting due diligence 16.

Decart’s primary technology is the Decart Optimization Stack (DOS), a vertically integrated software platform 5. DOS allows developers to switch workloads between different AI chips, including Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and Amazon’s Trainium processors 15. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided Decart with early access to its Trainium3 chips in 2025 12. Amazon has stated that running Decart’s Lucy2 model on Trainium3 hardware achieved 80% Model FLOPS Utilization, a metric for hardware efficiency 5.

Why it matters

The acquisition would secure software intended to make Amazon’s custom AI chips viable against Nvidia’s dominant hardware ecosystem 5. While Nvidia’s CUDA platform provides the established libraries and frameworks for most AI teams, porting models to non-Nvidia hardware typically requires months of engineering 5. Decart claims its DOS platform compresses this porting process to weeks 5.

The deal addresses the shifting economics of AI, where inference—the process of serving models to users—is estimated to account for 80% to 90% of a system's lifetime operating cost 5. Decart claims its software delivers 8x speed increases and 100x cost efficiency gains on equivalent hardware 5. Integrating these capabilities could elevate the proprietary cloud solutions of AWS and influence consumer-facing applications 3.

If finalized at $7 billion, the purchase would rank among Amazon’s largest acquisitions, alongside the $6.5 billion purchase of MGM in 2022 and the $11 billion deal for Globalstar earlier in 2026 13. It would also represent one of the most expensive exits in the history of the Israeli technology sector 56.

What's next

A finalized agreement signed by Amazon and Decart would establish the formal terms of the merger. Industry observers are monitoring for final contract terms as negotiations progress 3. A statement from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or other antitrust regulators would determine if the deal meets legal requirements for competition.

The integration of Decart’s framework into AWS would follow a successful closing. The outcome of these talks will determine whether Amazon secures the DOS platform to support its Trainium3 chip rollout or if the startup remains independent following the previous failed bid by Anthropic 15.