Startups

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

The Claude maker's largest-ever acquisition target builds software that squeezes more performance from AI chips — a fit for Anthropic's ballooning compute bill ahead of its IPO.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-08-16 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Taylor Vick — Rows of server racks with blinking blue lights inside a modern data center

Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart AI for roughly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg report on August 13 citing people familiar with the matter. If the deal closes, it’ll be by an order of magnitude the Claude maker’s largest disclosed acquisition, dwarfing the $400 million it paid earlier this year for Coefficient Bio.

The price is the frame. Decart, founded in 2023 and staffed by roughly 100 people, was last valued at almost $4 billion in a $300 million round led by Radical Ventures in May, with Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Adobe Ventures joining. That round itself was a step up from a $3.1 billion mark set in August 2025 by prior backers Sequoia, Benchmark, Zeev Ventures and customer-investor eBay. A $6 billion tag is a 50% premium on a valuation set three months ago.

What Anthropic is buying isn’t a model company in the usual sense. Decart’s public products, the live-video editor Lucy and the simulated-environment generator Oasis, sit on top of a stack designed to wring more usable performance out of existing GPUs. One person familiar with the talks told Bloomberg the acquisition is intended to help Anthropic’s computing infrastructure absorb more demand, and that Decart’s engineers would fold into Anthropic’s inference and performance organization.

That framing is the interesting part. Anthropic has spent the year signing compute contracts that read like sovereign-debt issuances: a $1.25 billion-a-month arrangement with SpaceX for access to the Colossus 1 data center, a 20-year lease worth $9.1 billion with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms, and a $19 billion agreement with TeraWulf. Buying a chip-efficiency team is the marginal-cost version of the same problem.

The auction context matters too. Nvidia, an investor in the May round, was itself reported to be in advanced talks to buy Decart, and Calcalist reported SpaceX had circled the company as well. Elon Musk called that last claim “fake news” on X. Whoever wins ends up owning a small team whose only real product is throughput, priced as though throughput is the scarce resource in AI. Which, for now, it’s.

Sources