The acquisition was expected to help Anthropic’s compute infrastructure absorb its growing demand.
Anthropic is backing away from talks to acquire Decart AI, a research start-up building technology that improves chip efficiency, Bloomberg news reported earlier today (8 September).
The deal was expected to be worth around $6bn, significantly higher than Decart’s reported nearly $4bn valuation following a $300m raise earlier this year.
Backed by Nvidia, Benchmark, Adobe, Sequoia and Radical Ventures among others, Decart’s AI infrastructure improves training and inferencing capacities of AI models.
Its foundational model Lucy supposedly edits live video at the speed of stream, while its so-called ‘world model’ Oasis, designed for physical AI, generates realistic simulations to train robots.
The acquisition was expected to help Anthropic’s compute infrastructure absorb some of its growing demand. The AI giant, according to The Information, has signed some $517bn in compute capacity leases in just over the past 11 months, which amounts to some 14.8GW of capacity.
The company also confirmed last month that it would be designing its own chips to circumvent the worldwide shortage in the technology and access a steady supply.
Headquartered in California, Decart was founded in 2023 by former Israeli Defence Forces’ intelligence unit soldiers; brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. Its $300m May raise was led by Radical Ventures and its co-founder Jordan Jacobs, and brought Decart’s total raise to more than $450m.
Reports of the failed Decart acquisition come as Anthropic is expected to delay marketing its initial public offering prospectus to mid-October. The AI giant’s highly anticipated public listing, investors hope, will make the largest debut in history, raising the company $75bn or more at a $2trn valuation.
Last month, a US judge blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic’s products for government use, handing the AI company a major win ahead of its plans to go public. The company sued the US government in March after its refusal to lower guardrails on its AI models led to an abrupt ‘supply chain risk’ designation.
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