Anthropic has reportedly ended talks to acquire Decart AI for approximately $6 billion after conducting due diligence on the AI startup, according to Bloomberg.
The deal would have been Anthropic’s largest acquisition to date and could have helped it reduce the cost of training and running AI models through Decart’s chip optimization technology. That could become increasingly valuable as Anthropic commits hundreds of billions of dollars to the computing capacity behind Claude.
Although the $6 billion deal is no longer proceeding, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Anthropic and Decart may still explore other ways to collaborate.
Alongside its chip optimization technology, Decart develops world models and real-time video tools. Its Lucy Virtual Try-On product can alter a live video stream to show someone wearing a selected garment, while its world models could also support autonomous-driving and robotics applications.
It was not clear whether Anthropic was only interested in the chip optimization technology or whether it also intended to retain the world-model business.
Anthropic has been on a huge spending spree over the past six months, shoring up its compute resources as demand for its AI models continues to accelerate. It committed approximately $517 billion to compute agreements over 11 months, according to The Information. Those commitments reportedly include paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for capacity from its Colossus data centers.
The company has also completed several smaller acquisitions, but its largest completed purchase remains the $300 million it reportedly paid for SDK and developer-tooling company Stainless.
A step up in acquisitions for AI companies
There has been an increase in dealmaking across the AI market as large technology companies scoop up smaller startups. Nvidia recently agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, potentially giving the chipmaker control of one of the largest repositories of open-source AI models if the transaction closes.
SpaceX also acquired Cursor, an AI coding tool, for $60 billion. The deal provided SpaceX’s AI lab, xAI, with much-needed expertise and customers in the enterprise AI market.
The abandoned Decart deal shows that AI companies are increasingly looking beyond models to control the infrastructure, software and developer tools surrounding them. For Claude customers, more efficient training and inference technology could eventually improve capacity, reliability and costs, although Anthropic has not announced any immediate product or pricing changes. The next question is whether Anthropic pursues another acquisition or gains access to Decart’s technology through a partnership.
Read more: Anthropic’s reported $35 billion Lambda agreement shows how aggressively the company is expanding the computing infrastructure behind Claude.