Anthropic Closes In on $7 Billion Decart Acquisition After Beating Nvidia to the Table

Anthropic is closing in on what would be by far the largest acquisition in its history: a deal to buy AI infrastructure startup Decart at a valuation of roughly $7 billion, according to a report from Israel’s Calcalist — a deal that values the three-year-old company at nearly double the $4 billion mark set in its last funding round just three months ago.

The story broke on August 13, when Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in talks to buy Decart AI for about $6 billion. Reuters confirmed the talks with its own sourcing the same day. By the weekend, Calcalist reported the picture had sharpened considerably: Decart is expected to be valued at approximately $7 billion in the final deal, with most of the consideration paid in Anthropic shares rather than cash — and, crucially, Anthropic won the bidding after beating Nvidia itself to the table.

Why Decart, and why now

On the surface, Decart is an unusual target for a frontier lab known for its safety-focused research culture. The San Francisco-based company — founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, both veterans of the Israeli military’s elite technological units — sits at the intersection of two very different bets.

The first is AI infrastructure optimization. Decart builds software that helps chips operate more efficiently, reducing the amount of computing power required to train and run AI models. Its technology is designed to make switching between AI chips easier — a capability that caught Nvidia’s attention earlier this year, when the GPU giant participated in Decart’s $300 million funding round led by Radical Ventures, which valued the startup at nearly $4 billion and brought its total raised to more than $450 million. Amazon joined as a strategic investor in the same round.

The second is real-time world models. Decart’s consumer-facing work — including its viral Lucy model, which transforms live footage into interactive digital environments at millisecond latency — represents the “live AI” frontier: environments that respond instantly rather than generating seconds-long video clips. The company brands itself as “the live AI lab the world runs on.”

For Anthropic, the strategic logic centers on the first bet. As The Daily Upside noted, the deal talks signal that Anthropic’s leadership sees cost efficiency — not just raw capability — as the decisive competitive axis for the next phase of the AI race. Training and inference costs at frontier scale now run into the billions of dollars per model generation. A technology that squeezes more performance out of every GPU, or that makes Anthropic’s workloads more portable across chip vendors, directly attacks the single largest line item in its cost structure.

A stock deal before the listing

The deal’s structure is arguably its most revealing detail. Calcalist reports that most of the consideration is expected to be paid in Anthropic shares — a structure that only makes sense in light of Anthropic’s widely reported march toward an initial public offering.

Paying in stock lets Anthropic preserve cash while giving Decart’s founders and investors — Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Zeev Ventures, Aleph, and Radical Ventures among them — equity in a company whose valuation trajectory has been among the steepest in the industry. Barron’s framed the acquisition explicitly as an IPO precursor: Anthropic using its richly valued private stock as acquisition currency before the listing fixes its price in public markets.

There is a familiar playbook here. Acquiring hot startups with shares ahead of a public debut was a signature move of the last tech boom, and it carries the same risks: if the public market values Anthropic below its private mark, Decart’s shareholders absorb the difference. It also concentrates Decart’s team — reportedly including founders who favor the Anthropic outcome over a Nvidia one, per Calcalist — inside a company whose stock they cannot sell until lockups expire.

The Nvidia subplot

Perhaps the most striking element of the story is who lost. According to Calcalist, Nvidia — an existing Decart investor through its venture arm — also pursued the startup, and the founders and Sequoia ultimately favored Anthropic’s offer.

That inverts the usual power dynamic of the AI boom. Nvidia has been the kingmaker of the entire cycle, seeding dozens of startups with capital and GPU allocations that effectively tie them to its ecosystem. Decart is exactly the kind of company Nvidia wants close: its software makes AI workloads more chip-agnostic, which is either a threat to Nvidia’s lock-in or an opportunity to extend its reach, depending on who controls it.

An Anthropic acquisition takes that technology in-house at one of Nvidia’s most important customers. Anthropic is among the largest buyers of accelerated computing in the world, and its interest in Decart’s efficiency layer reads as vertical integration: if you cannot make chips cheaper, make every chip you already own go further — and keep your options open on whose chips you buy next.

From $3.1 billion to $7 billion in a year

The speed of Decart’s revaluation is its own datapoint about the market. In August 2025, the company raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation — its third round in eleven months. In May 2026, the Radical-led round pushed the valuation to nearly $4 billion. An acquisition at roughly $7 billion would mean the company’s value nearly doubled again in three months, driven less by new product revenue than by strategic scarcity: chip-efficiency talent and IP are suddenly among the most contested assets in the industry.

None of the parties involved — Anthropic, Decart, Nvidia, or the investors — has publicly confirmed the talks, and Bloomberg’s original reporting cautioned the deal has not been finalized and could still fall apart. But with Calcalist reporting the terms have tightened around a $7 billion share-heavy structure, the trajectory points toward a signed agreement in the near term.

What it signals

Three takeaways for anyone tracking the industry’s direction:

Compute economics is now a first-order strategic concern. When a frontier lab’s biggest-ever deal is for efficiency software rather than another model team or data asset, it tells you where the margins are being fought over. Expect more acquisitions in the inference-optimization and chip-portability layer.

The IPO window is shaping behavior. Share-based dealmaking ahead of a listing is a bet on public-market appetite. Every such deal — this one included — is effectively a leveraged position on AI equity valuations holding up through the offering.

Nvidia’s ecosystem strategy has a counterweight. For two years, Nvidia’s venture investments have functioned as a moat. Decart choosing Anthropic over its own investor suggests frontier customers are now big enough — and motivated enough — to compete for the same strategic assets.

If the deal closes near the reported terms, it will stand as one of the largest acquisitions in the AI industry’s history, and the clearest signal yet that the race has entered its cost-cutting phase.