Anthropic ended talks to acquire Decart after due diligence, walking away from a deal reported at roughly $6 billion that would have been its largest known acquisition, per Bloomberg. No final agreement had been reached, and people familiar with the talks say the two could still cooperate in other forms. Talks were first reported in mid-August. Both companies declined to comment.
Decart's last mark was near $4 billion, set by a $300 million Series B led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia and Amazon among its backers, so $6 billion was about a 50% premium. Founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev, it sells the DOS optimization stack, which targets inference speed and cost across Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and Amazon Trainium, alongside real-time video and world models. Anthropic runs on all three chip families.
Anthropic's fixed obligations make that software valuable. It has signed about $45 billion with Nscale, a 20-year TeraWulf lease, and other capacity commitments this year, and each point of inference efficiency compounds against them. Paying a 50% premium into goodwill ahead of an IPO is a different calculation, since public investors will scrutinize both the price and the write-down risk. Ending talks after diligence suggests the price stopped clearing once the numbers were open.
Frontier labs have spent the year paying nearly any price for compute and talent. Here one declined. A commercial deal would deliver most of the efficiency without the goodwill, and that option improves as a listing gets closer. Decart keeps its independence and its Nvidia and Amazon relationships.
Bottom Line
A lab with tens of billions in leased compute passed on a $6 billion inference-efficiency acquisition after seeing the books. Treat it as pre-IPO price discipline, and watch for a commercial deal between the two, which gets most of the benefit without the goodwill.