Anthropic in Talks to Buy Israeli Startup Decart for $6 Billion as IPO Target Reportedly Reaches $2 Trillion

Since Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO with the SEC in early June, the numbers attached to the company have kept climbing, and now a major acquisition is in the mix too.

Anthropic is in talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart for about $6 billion, according to Bloomberg and Reuters, confirming an earlier report from Calcalist that pegged the deal at $6 to $7 billion. If it closes, it would be the largest acquisition in Anthropic's history.

The talks are early and could still fall apart, Bloomberg reported. Reuters reported that Decart's team would join Anthropic's inference and performance organization if the deal goes through. Anthropic declined to comment. Decart did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to Calcalist.

Calcalist reported that Nvidia had been in advanced negotiations to buy Decart before another buyer stepped in, and that Amazon, Nebius, and SpaceX had all been floated as potential acquirers. Elon Musk has since said SpaceX will not be buying Decart, despite sources telling Calcalist earlier that SpaceX was among the interested parties.

Decart works on getting more performance out of expensive AI computing infrastructure, which is the single biggest cost and bottleneck facing every major AI lab right now, Anthropic included.

The IPO number keeps moving

While that deal plays out, Anthropic's public offering math keeps getting bigger. The company raised $65 billion in a Series H round in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, according to TechCrunch, and filed a confidential draft S-1 with the SEC on June 1.

Now the Financial Times reports that Anthropic's backers are positioning for a public valuation of $2 trillion or more, with an October IPO in view. Business Insider reported in July that secondary-market trades had already priced Anthropic near $1.2 trillion, though actual trading volume was thin because few holders wanted to sell.

That thinness matters. A valuation built on a handful of trades among people who don't want to part with their shares is not the same thing as a market-tested price. It can look solid right up until it isn't.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic is now targeting a September or early October debut and is already meeting with prospective investors, though it hasn't set pricing or an exact date. Those meetings, according to the Journal, have not been friction-free.

Investors are asking the hard questions

Investors pressed Anthropic's leadership on three specific things, per the Journal: competition from cheap Chinese AI models, tension with the Trump administration, and public resistance to building more U.S. data centers. In each case the follow-up was the same: what does this do to growth?

Anthropic has downplayed the China threat, with CEO Dario Amodei and other executives arguing that most users want the smartest available model and that Chinese systems lag Western frontier models by months. That claim is getting harder to defend. According to the-decoder, Chinese models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 have closed much of that gap on benchmarks recently, shrinking the six-to-eight-month lead executives used to cite.

That's a real problem for a company whose trillion-dollar-plus valuation rests partly on the idea that it has a durable technology edge. Anthropic's response, according to people involved in the investor discussions cited by the Journal, is to push harder into health and biology applications to shift the narrative away from raw model competition.

The compute bill is the other half of the story

None of this happens without power and chips. Barron's reported that Riot Platforms, a company built around Bitcoin mining, signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year compute capacity agreement with Anthropic covering 191 megawatts from its Rockdale, Texas campus through 2048, with extensions that could push the deal to $16.1 billion. The Journal also reported that Anthropic signed additional compute deals with SpaceX and Google in recent weeks.

On the revenue side, Anthropic said its run-rate crossed $47 billion in May, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to Axios. The company has said more than 300,000 businesses use Claude, including more than 1,000 customers spending over $1 million annually. Those are real contracts with real enterprise customers, not just usage charts.

But growth that fast requires infrastructure spending that fast, and the SpaceX IPO is the cautionary tale everyone in this story keeps citing. Reuters reported SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, valuing the company at $1.77 trillion, and the stock briefly pushed past $2 trillion before giving back a chunk of those gains, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A confidential S-1 doesn't mean shares are for sale yet, and Anthropic has said publicly that neither share count nor price has been set, with the offering contingent on market conditions. TradingView's IPO calendar lists a planned offer date of October 23, though that is a projection, not a confirmed date from Anthropic itself.

The open questions now: does the Decart acquisition close, and at what final price. Does Anthropic's revenue growth actually hold up against a widening Chinese competitive field once the S-1 becomes public. And will public investors pay $2 trillion for a company that, like SpaceX, could see that number evaporate fast after the opening bell.