Anthropic has dropped its pursuit of Decart, the Nvidia-backed AI infrastructure startup valued at about $6 billion, Reuters reported Tuesday. The Claude chatbot maker had been in talks to acquire Decart as it explored deals to handle growing demand ahead of a planned public listing.
Neither Anthropic nor Decart responded to requests for comment outside business hours, so the reason for the collapse is unconfirmed. Reuters first reported the talks last month, describing an acquisition process tied to Anthropic’s push to scale compute and infrastructure capacity before going public.
Decart develops AI infrastructure and optimization technology. Its products include Lucy, a live-video editing model, and Oasis, a simulation platform. Nvidia is among its backers, which made a deal an awkward fit in at least one respect: Anthropic has publicly clashed with Nvidia over chip export policy, with CEO Dario Amodei pressing for tighter controls on semiconductor sales to China while Nvidia pushed back against restrictions on its business there.
Timing points to the IPO
The more likely explanation is the calendar. Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering and is expected to begin marketing the offering in mid-October at the earliest, with a listing targeted before the US midterm elections in November. A $6 billion acquisition in the weeks before a roadshow adds diligence risk, integration questions and a large line item on the balance sheet, none of which help a listing narrative.
The company was generating an estimated $3.6 billion in annualized revenue as of March, and its valuation has climbed steeply through successive funding rounds. Buying an infrastructure optimization startup is more attractive when you can pay with stock after listing than when every dollar comes from private capital ahead of it.
Anthropic’s most recent model releases underline the scale pressure behind the acquisition exploration. The company shipped Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 at the start of September, positioning them for long-running coding and research agents, workloads that consume compute at a different order of magnitude than chat traffic.
What Decart does and why it mattered
Decart’s pitch is efficiency. Its optimization technology squeezes more inference out of existing GPU fleets, which matters to any lab serving models at scale. Lucy and Oasis gave it consumer-facing proof that its stack works on demanding, low-latency workloads. For Anthropic, which rents much of its compute from cloud partners including Microsoft Azure under a $30 billion commitment announced alongside earlier funding, owning optimization technology offered a partial hedge against capacity constraints.
The deal would also have carried Nvidia deeper into Anthropic’s cap table indirectly. Nvidia’s investments in AI labs have drawn criticism as circular financing, with chipmakers funding the customers who buy their chips. Anthropic walking away removes one such entanglement, though Nvidia’s backing of Decart itself remains unchanged.
Consolidation keeps hitting walls
The abandoned deal is the second high-profile AI acquisition effort to fall apart this quarter, and it fits a pattern. Startup valuations have recovered sharply, and potential targets priced for IPOs have little reason to sell at a discount. A $6 billion price tag for a company with research-stage products signals how expensive the market has become, even for buyers with Anthropic’s resources.
Anthropic is not short of options. The company has raised tens of billions in private capital, including a $10 billion commitment from Nvidia and up to $5 billion from Microsoft announced in late 2025, and it has continued hiring in infrastructure roles. Dropping one acquisition does not change the compute math; it changes who owns the solutions.
For Decart, the outcome leaves an independent path. The company can continue raising at its reported valuation, pursue its own listing eventually, or wait for the post-IPO Anthropic, or another lab, to return with stock it can actually spend. Nothing in Tuesday’s report suggests the technology stopped being relevant, only that the price and the timing stopped working.
Attention now shifts to Anthropic’s listing. If marketing begins in mid-October as expected, it will be one of the largest technology IPOs of the year, and the first hard market test of what a frontier AI lab is actually worth to public investors.
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