Anthropic Walks Away From Reported $6 Billion Decart Acquisition

Anthropic has reportedly decided not to acquire Decart, ending negotiations over a transaction valued at about $6 billion. The reported deal would have been Anthropic’s largest known acquisition, but it was never finalized. Reporting says Anthropic completed due diligence and ultimately walked away; neither company publicly explained the decision.1040

What happened to the Decart deal?

Reports of Anthropic’s interest emerged on August 12–13, when Reuters and Bloomberg said the Claude developer was in talks to buy Nvidia-backed Decart for roughly $6 billion. At that point, the transaction was described as unfinished and capable of falling apart.45

On September 8, reports said Anthropic had decided against the acquisition after conducting due diligence. Public reporting does not establish when private negotiations first began—only that they had been under discussion by mid-August and were described later as protracted.1034

The key limitation is equally important: there is no public account of a decisive due-diligence finding, valuation dispute, technical issue or contractual term that ended the talks. Anthropic and Decart declined to comment in reporting on the decision. Attributing the outcome to IPO preparation, antitrust risk, or a specific problem with Decart would therefore go beyond the available evidence.4048

Why Decart was strategically relevant

Decart develops AI infrastructure and optimization technology, alongside its own AI models. Its software is designed to help chips operate more efficiently, which can reduce the cost of training and running AI models.45

That makes the prospective fit straightforward: more efficient infrastructure could help Anthropic serve growing demand using its existing computing footprint. Reporting also indicated that Decart’s team could have joined Anthropic’s inference and performance organization, placing the acquisition squarely in the company’s infrastructure strategy rather than in a consumer-product expansion.538

Decart was founded in 2023 by Israeli brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. It raised $300 million in a May funding round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Adobe Ventures participating, according to contemporaneous reporting.14

A deal ending does not rule out a partnership

The acquisition may be off, but the companies could still collaborate in another form. People familiar with the matter told reporters that Anthropic and Decart may explore other opportunities, including a potential customer or investment relationship. No such arrangement has been publicly announced.3440

That distinction matters. An acquisition would have given Anthropic ownership of Decart and its team; a commercial relationship could still give Anthropic access to relevant technology without a full purchase.

Anthropic is still buying enormous amounts of compute

The decision not to buy Decart should not be read as a retreat from infrastructure spending. Separate reporting says Anthropic signed a $35 billion cloud-computing agreement with Nvidia-backed Lambda to expand capacity for its AI operations.12

The reported arrangement involves a data-center project in Nueces County, Texas, developed by Hut 8. Reuters reported the project covers about 350 megawatts, while The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia holds the lease on the data center and Lambda provides cloud capacity to Anthropic.13

These are different strategic choices:

• The Decart talks concerned owning an efficiency and optimization company.
• The Lambda arrangement concerns securing external computing capacity.

Together, they support a narrow conclusion: Anthropic continues to prioritize access to substantial compute resources, even though it chose not to complete the Decart acquisition. The Lambda deal does not, however, reveal why the Decart transaction failed.110

The IPO backdrop

On June 1, Anthropic said it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. The company said the offering would depend on market conditions and other factors; it did not disclose the number of shares, price or a listing date.30

Reports have suggested that Anthropic’s eventual prospectus could identify negative public sentiment toward AI and data centers as a risk factor. But the S-1 remains confidential, so the final language and prominence of any such disclosure are not public.2330

What is actually known

The reported $6 billion Decart transaction ended after due diligence, with no verified public explanation for Anthropic’s decision. Decart’s technology remained relevant to the economics of large-scale AI: improving chip efficiency can lower the cost of training and serving models. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s reported Lambda commitment shows that the company is still aggressively securing compute as it prepares for a possible public offering.5130

The open questions are substantial: whether Anthropic and Decart will collaborate, whether Decart will seek another buyer or partner, and when—if at all—Anthropic proceeds with an IPO. For now, the evidence supports a change in acquisition strategy, not a reversal in Anthropic’s infrastructure ambitions.