Anthropic Reportedly Eyes $6B Decart Deal As AI Labs Hunt For Cheaper, Faster Compute

As Anthropic and OpenAI spend tens of billions of dollars expanding cloud capacity, controlling costs has emerged as a growing focus for both companies and their investors.

• Anthropic is eyeing the acquisition of Decart for $6 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing sources.
• Decart develops software designed to make AI chips run more efficiently.
• Anthropic is heading for an IPO, and recent reports say it may launch the share sale as early as next month.

Anthropic’s reported talks to acquire AI startup Decart for about $6 billion underscore how the race to build increasingly powerful artificial intelligence is also becoming a race to make computing cheaper. 

If completed, the deal would be Anthropic’s largest known acquisition and come as the Claude maker ramps spending on infrastructure ahead of a closely watched IPO.  

Bloomberg reported the deal talks in a report late Wednesday, which added that talks are ongoing and could fall through as well.

Founded in 2023, Decart develops software designed to make AI chips run more efficiently, helping companies squeeze more performance from expensive computing hardware. 

Its Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS, is built to optimize AI training and inference across Nvidia chips, Amazon’s Trainium and Google’s TPUs. That makes Decart strategically important for Anthropic, as inference costs rise alongside demand for AI tools like Claude. 

AI Labs’ Ballooning Cloud Bill

The development suggests Anthropic is increasingly looking for ways to get more AI work from each chip rather than simply adding more hardware.

Anthropic has committed billions toward the expansion of its compute capacity. In November, the company purchased $30 billion of Microsoft Azure compute capacity, while also announcing a $50 billion investment in data centers with Fluidstack. 

In April, Anthropic expanded its Amazon partnership to secure up to 5 gigawatts of additional compute and committed more than $100 billion to AWS technologies over 10 years.  

OpenAI faces a similar infrastructure burden. Its Stargate project with Oracle includes 4.5 gigawatts of additional US data-center capacity, taking capacity under development above 5 gigawatts and involving more than 2 million chips.

Anthropic, OpenAI Recent Deals

Anthropic has largely kept its acquisition strategy focused on small, technical teams. It acquired Stainless in May 2026, an SDK and MCP tooling company, and Vercept in February 2026, a startup developing AI systems capable of interacting with computers. Before that, it acquired Bun in December 2025, a high-performance JavaScript runtime and developer toolkit.

OpenAI has pursued larger and more frequent deals, most notably its $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s io in May 2025, bringing the hardware startup’s team into OpenAI to develop AI-powered consumer devices.

More recently, OpenAI agreed to acquire Promptfoo in March 2026, an AI security and testing platform, and Astral later that month, a maker of widely used Python developer tools.

Anthropic IPO Watch, Competition

The spending comes as investors prepare for Anthropic’s potential Wall Street debut, which recent reports say could be next month or in early October.

As private companies, Anthropic and OpenAI do not disclose their cash burn, but reports suggest their spending remains high. Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May, with revenue reaching a $47 billion annualized run rate. OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate (ARR) stands at approximately $25 billion.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment was ‘bearish’ for Anthropic and ‘bullish’ for OpenAI. Anthropic is valued at $1.14 trillion, compared to OpenAI’s private market valuation of $869.8 billion, according to data from Nasdaq Private Market.

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