Anthropic in talks to buy AI chip-efficiency startup Decart for $6 billion

Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart, an Israeli AI infrastructure startup, for roughly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg report confirmed by multiple outlets on August 13. Both companies declined to comment, the talks are not final, and the deal could still fall apart — but if it closes, it would be by far the largest acquisition in Anthropic's history, eclipsing at least four smaller deals the company has made so far this year.

Why chip efficiency, not another chatbot

What makes the target notable is what Decart actually builds. Founded in 2023 by Israeli engineers Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev, Decart doesn't compete with Claude — it builds software that extracts more usable performance from the same underlying hardware. Its Decart Optimization Stack (DOS) is designed to improve training and inference efficiency across Nvidia GPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips, and Google's TPUs. Decart's team, if the deal closes, is expected to join Anthropic's inference and performance organization rather than a product team.

The company also has a more visible side: its Lucy model handles real-time video editing, and its Oasis model, demoed in October 2024, generates interactive simulation environments. But industry reporting suggests it's the unglamorous efficiency layer — the part that lowers the electricity and hardware bill per token — that's driving Anthropic's interest, not the generative video work.

The price reflects a steep re-rating

Decart was valued at $3.1 billion in August 2025. By this May, after a $300 million round led by Radical Ventures, that had climbed to roughly $4 billion. A $6 billion acquisition price would represent a roughly 50% premium over that most recent mark — a fast climb for a company that's only two years old, and a signal of how much AI labs are now willing to pay for infrastructure efficiency specifically, rather than for new model capabilities.

Timing lines up with Anthropic's IPO track

Anthropic's own valuation has climbed to around $965 billion following its most recent funding round, and the company confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration with the SEC in early June — the standard first step toward a public listing. A near-$6 billion acquisition landing this close to that filing is unlikely to be coincidental: buying compute-efficiency technology outright, rather than continuing to license or build it internally, is a way to control a cost line that public-market investors will scrutinize closely once Anthropic reports quarterly numbers.

The broader context is what industry watchers have started calling a “thrift-maxxing” era in AI — with cheaper Chinese models continuing to undercut Western labs on price and investors growing wary of the industry's ballooning compute bills, efficiency technology has become as strategically valuable as raw model capability. A $6 billion bet on chip efficiency, rather than another frontier model lab or product acquisition, fits squarely into that shift. Whether the Decart deal actually closes at this price — or at all — remains to be confirmed, as first reported by Bloomberg.