Nvidia invested in a three-year-old startup called Decart, tried to acquire it, and is now watching Amazon negotiate to buy it for roughly seven billion dollars. Decart raised three hundred million dollars in May in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor, at a valuation of nearly four billion dollars according to PitchBook data cited by the Wall Street Journal. Five months later the buyer is the company building its own chips to compete with Nvidia.
What Decart sells is a software stack called DOS that lets developers run and optimize AI models across different chips — Nvidia GPUs, Amazon's Trainium, Google's TPUs — cutting the cost of migration between them. That matters because Nvidia's grip on AI hardware depends less on the silicon than on CUDA, the software layer woven into virtually every customer's code and engineering. Switching to a cheaper chip means rewriting months of work, which is why most companies stay. The software Nvidia helped fund makes that rewrite unnecessary.
Nvidia tried to buy Decart before anyone else. Calcalist reported that the founders chose Anthropic instead, despite Nvidia's higher offer, partly because they believed Anthropic stock would yield a higher return. Anthropic walked away from talks near six billion dollars, Bloomberg reported in September. Then Amazon arrived — and Amazon has been building toward this for a decade. It bought Israeli chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015 for about three hundred and fifty million dollars, and Annapurna went on to design Trainium, the custom processor Amazon now positions against Nvidia's GPUs. AWS gave Decart early access to its latest version, and Decart reported up to four times faster frame generation at half the cost of GPUs on that hardware.
DOS supports Nvidia, Google, and Amazon hardware alike, and lets customers move between them without rewriting their code. That neutrality is what makes it worth seven billion dollars. GeekWire raised the question directly: whether Decart keeps supporting rival chips under Amazon's ownership, or tilts toward Trainium. If it tilts, the cross-platform value that justifies the price starts to dissolve. A tool that lets customers leave any chip vendor works differently once a chip vendor owns it.
A tool that lets customers leave any chip vendor works differently once a chip vendor owns it.
