Amazon is reportedly circling Decart after Nvidia and Anthropic both walked away

Three different tech giants have now chased the same Israeli AI startup in under four months, and the price keeps climbing even as two of them gave up.

Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart, the Israeli startup behind real-time video and "world model" AI, according to people familiar with the matter. The potential deal could value Decart at around $7 billion, a sharp jump from the nearly $4 billion valuation the company fetched in a funding round led by Radical Ventures just months earlier. Earlier reports also linked SpaceX and cloud computing firm Nebius to interest in Decart, though Elon Musk publicly denied that SpaceX was negotiating for the company.

Decart has been through a strange few months. Nvidia, which had already invested in the company's most recent funding round, entered exclusive talks to buy it outright. Those talks fell apart once a bigger offer showed up. Founders Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev then picked Anthropic over Nvidia's higher bid, and the two sides spent weeks trading drafts of an acquisition agreement that would have paid out mostly in Anthropic stock at a roughly $7 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg and Reuters reporting from August. Then, in early September, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic walked away after conducting due diligence. No deal. The company that outbid Nvidia for Decart didn't actually want Decart once it looked under the hood.

That collapse is what opened the door for Amazon.

Decart, founded in 2023 and based in Tel Aviv, isn't a video-generation novelty act. Its core product is DOS, the Decart Optimization Stack, an inference and training platform the company says delivers over 1,600 tokens per second for agentic workloads against an industry average closer to 200. On top of that sits Lucy, a real-time world model aimed at things like virtual try-on and live video transformation, and Oasis, a world model built for physical AI and robotics. Decart says Lucy 2.5 generates live video at 30 frames per second, while DOS 2.0 can process more than 1,600 tokens per second for agents and up to 100 frames of high-definition video per second for world models.

That speed is the entire pitch. Most generative video tools render a clip and hand it back minutes later. Decart's software reacts while you're still interacting with it, which is the difference between a demo video and something you could plausibly bolt onto a game engine, a robotics stack, or a live-streaming product today.

It's also why the list of interested buyers reads like a who's-who of companies that need faster AI inference, not just flashier video. Nvidia wanted it for chip-level optimization. Anthropic wanted it, according to Globes and multiple other outlets, partly for the infrastructure tech and partly for the video capability. Now it's Amazon's turn, and Amazon's interest lines up with a pattern: AWS has been racing to bolt generative AI features onto everything from Alexa+ to its Rufus shopping assistant, and owning a company that already claims an 8x speed advantage on agentic inference would feed directly into that effort.

Elon Musk, for what it's worth, has called reports that SpaceX was negotiating for Decart "fake news," which muddies exactly who within Musk's orbit was actually at the table. Nebius, a Netherlands-based neocloud operator, has also been tied to earlier interest in Decart. Amazon has not confirmed the talks publicly.

What's striking here isn't just the price tag. It's that two buyers with deep pockets and real strategic reasons to want this technology, Nvidia and Anthropic, both walked right up to the deal and then didn't sign it. Anthropic's retreat came after actual due diligence, not a change of heart over dinner. That's usually a signal that whatever a company finds once it opens the books doesn't match the story told in the pitch deck. Maybe it's integration risk. Maybe it's the IP. Decart and its remaining suitors clearly don't think so, or at least think the underlying tech is worth the risk anyway.

Frankly, a startup that's survived being jilted twice at a $6 billion-plus valuation and still has three serious bidders circling is not a company in trouble. It's a company sitting on something genuinely scarce: working real-time generative video infrastructure, at a moment when every major AI lab and cloud provider needs exactly that and has the cash to prove it.

Anthropic is also reportedly gearing up for an IPO, with Bloomberg reporting in early October that the company is now targeting a public listing before Thanksgiving after pushing back earlier plans. That timing may explain why Anthropic preferred to walk away cleanly rather than carry an unresolved $6 billion acquisition into a public offering. Amazon has no IPO to worry about, and no obligation to explain its M&A math to new shareholders. If the Decart auction closes with Amazon's name on the contract, it will be one more proof point that in this cycle, the biggest balance sheets end up winning the AI shopping spree, even for the startups everyone else already tried to buy first.

Also read: Jeff Bezos predicts AI will bring a three-day work week as Amazon cuts jobs • AI Spending Is Now Pushing Up Borrowing Costs Around the World • Masayoshi Son is asking the Gulf for $100 billion on top of his OpenAI bet

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