Anthropic is in talks to acquire Israeli AI infrastructure startup Decart for approximately $6 billion, according to Bloomberg, in what would be the Claude maker's largest acquisition to date. The deal remains early-stage and could fall through. Decart was last valued at ~$4 billion in May 2026 after a $300 million funding round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia as a new investor, making the current $6 billion price a ~50% premium.
Decart specializes in software that optimizes chip efficiency for AI training and inference, reducing compute costs through its proprietary DOS platform. The startup also develops world-model technology including its Lucy real-time video generation model and Oasis simulated environment generator. For Anthropic, the acquisition targets a critical strategic need: improving infrastructure efficiency as Claude adoption surges and compute costs mount.
The move comes as Anthropic prepares for an anticipated IPO and grapples with accelerating compute expenses. The company is racing to expand capacity and efficiency alongside competitors like OpenAI (spending $50B+ on compute in 2026) and is already investing $1.25 billion monthly in xAI's data centers. Anthropic also just confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC in June, having raised to a ~$1 trillion valuation.
For architects evaluating model deployment, the Anthropic-Decart deal signals that inference efficiency—not just raw model capability—has become the primary frontier. As training and serving frontier models grow prohibitively expensive, startups that improve silicon utilization become acquisition targets. Monitor Anthropic's public cost-per-token metrics post-IPO to validate whether Decart technology meaningfully improves the economics of Claude infrastructure.