The Amazon Decart Quiz: Six Questions on the $7 Billion Talks

Amazon is reportedly in talks to buy Decart, a San Francisco AI startup, for around seven billion dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported, according to Bloomberg's coverage of the Journal's reporting. It would be one of the largest AI acquisitions of the year. A deal could be signed soon unless the talks collapse or another bidder shows up, the Journal's sources said.

This Amazon Decart quiz breaks down everything that makes the startup worth that kind of money: the chip-portability software, the video and simulation models, and the funding history. Six questions, six answers. Keep score as you go.

Question one: what is Decart, and what is the rumored price?

Question one of the Amazon Decart quiz is the easy one. Decart is an AI startup whose main product is software that lets developers run AI models across different kinds of chips without rebuilding them for each one, alongside two so-called world models that generate video and simulate three-dimensional environments. The rumored price is around seven billion dollars, per the Journal's reporting. That is nearly double the valuation Decart carried after its May funding round.

Question two: who founded Decart?

Decart was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers, brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, with Dean Leitersdorf serving as chief executive, according to press reports summarized by The Hindu BusinessLine. The founders set up shop in San Francisco and the company quickly became a prominent name in AI infrastructure.

Question three: what does the Decart Optimization Stack do?

Question three of the Amazon Decart quiz gets at the core of the valuation. AI models are usually built for specific chips, and moving them elsewhere takes performance tuning and extra engineering. The Decart Optimization Stack, known as DOS, is a software engine that strips out most of that work, letting developers shift AI training and inference workloads between processors from different vendors with minimal friction, according to BigGo Finance's explainer. With compute demand outrunning supply, a tool that loosens dependence on any single chip supplier is worth real money.

Question four: what are Lucy and Oasis?

Question four of the Amazon Decart quiz is about the models themselves. Lucy and Oasis are Decart's two world models: AI systems trained on text and millions of hours of video so they learn how the physical world behaves, then use that to create virtual three-dimensional environments. Lucy edits live video in real time. Point it at a person and it can generate a high-resolution overlay that makes it look like they are trying on clothes or accessories, which is why fashion e-commerce companies are interested. Oasis generates interactive simulations used to train and test robots and self-driving systems before they touch the real world. Seoul Economic Daily describes the models as central to Decart's pitch, and eBay is both an investor in the company and a customer of the technology.

Question five: how much did Decart raise in May, and who backed it?

Question five of the Amazon Decart quiz is about the money. Decart raised three hundred million dollars in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor, according to the Journal's reporting as summarized by The Hindu BusinessLine. Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Adobe Ventures also joined, while Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures were already on board. The round valued Decart at almost four billion dollars, up from roughly three billion the previous summer, per PitchBook data cited in the reports. The rumored Amazon price would nearly double that May valuation. One more detail worth knowing: Anthropic reportedly explored buying Decart for about six billion dollars and walked away.

Question six: why does Amazon want Decart this badly?

Question six of the Amazon Decart quiz is the one that matters most, because Amazon is already Decart's biggest customer. The startup's technology is deployed across Amazon's video streamer Twitch, its online retail business, and its movie and television studios, according to a Seeking Alpha breakdown republished by TradingView. Amazon also gave Decart early access to Trainium3, its third-generation custom AI chip, last year after a meeting with the founders impressed the cloud team, according to Breaking the News. Buying the company outright would give Amazon a software layer built to bridge its own silicon with customer workloads, which would strengthen its cloud position against rival chipmakers, according to BigGo Finance's analysis.

Tally up your score. Six out of six means you could brief a Wall Street analyst on this deal. Three to five is solid, and the chip-portability answer is the one to remember. Under three, reread question three, because whoever owns the layer between AI models and chips owns a piece of the industry's future.

The deal is not done, and rival bidders could still appear. But if Amazon closes it, the cloud wars get a lot more interesting. For a sense of how fast the AI arms race is moving this month, GenZNewZ's look at the Meta Muse launch is a good companion read, and Decart's live-video tricks belong to the same wave of AI remaking media as AI-upscaled television. Either way, this Amazon Decart quiz just made you fluent in the story.