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Big Tech is buying AI teams: Amazon, Apple and Cloudflare show three ways to do it

Amazon is reportedly in talks to buy video-AI startup Decart for about $7 billion. Apple took a hiring right and a non-exclusive licence from Huxe, the audio startup built by NotebookLM alumni. Cloudflare bought Deno outright to fix a gap in Workers. The structures differ. For builders, the question is what each buyer is paying for.

By Cole Harlan · 12 Oct 2026 · 12 min

AI-generated illustration: three glass towers drawing in streams of code blocks
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Big Tech keeps buying AI teams. Sometimes it buys the company too. Sometimes it skips that part.

Three deals from the past four days show the range. Amazon is reported to be in talks to buy Decart, a real-time video model maker, for about $7 billion. Apple has the right to hire Huxe’s staff and a non-exclusive licence to its IP, but did not buy Huxe. Cloudflare is acquiring Deno, the company behind the JavaScript runtime, and folding its team into Workers.

Amazon’s would be a full purchase, if it happens. Apple’s is an acqui-hire with a licence attached. Cloudflare’s is a tuck-in that ends a product line.

Amazon and Decart: $7B talks reported, nothing confirmed

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, Oct 11, that Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart in a deal that could be valued at around $7 billion. The Journal cited people familiar with the matter. Reuters carried the report the same evening and said it could not immediately verify it. Reuters said Decart and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment. The Straits Times, carrying Reuters copy, said Amazon declined to comment outside regular business hours.

CTN has found no statement from Amazon or Decart. Treat the deal as talks reported, not a deal done.

Per the Reuters summary of the Journal’s story, a deal could come soon if talks do not fall apart or another suitor does not emerge. The Journal put Decart’s May valuation at nearly $4 billion, citing PitchBook data. Reuters also reported that Decart raised $300 million in May in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor.

There is a back story. Reuters, citing Bloomberg News, said Anthropic explored buying Decart in August for potentially $6 billion. Bloomberg reported last month that Anthropic decided not to proceed after due diligence. CTN has not read the Bloomberg pieces directly; those details are attributed to Bloomberg via Reuters.

What would Amazon get? Decart’s own website lists two model lines. Oasis is described as a real-time interactive world model “for physical AI,” aimed at robotics, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing and drones. Lucy is pitched as a world-editing model for real-time video, used in virtual try-on, live advertising, social platforms and gaming. The site also promotes the Decart Optimization Stack, which it says runs “across NVIDIA, AWS Trainium and Google TPU.”

Trainium is Amazon’s own AI chip, so Decart already works on AWS silicon. And Oasis lines up with Amazon’s own push into robotics. Last week AWS published an open-source “Physical AI Toolchain” built with NVIDIA’s robotics stack, according to an About Amazon post. That post says Amazon runs more than 1 million robots across its operations network. No source links the two, and CTN is not linking them.

If it closes, Amazon pays full price for technology and team.

Apple and Huxe: an acqui-hire with a non-exclusive licence

The Apple deal surfaced through Europe, not Cupertino. On Oct 9, MacRumors and 9to5Mac reported an entry on the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act transparency list. Under the DMA, gatekeepers such as Apple must inform the Commission about concentrations.

9to5Mac quoted the entry in full. Dated 9 June 2026, it says Apple “will have the right to make employment offers to and hire certain employees of Huxe AI, Inc. (‘Huxe’) and receive a non-exclusive license to Huxe’s intellectual property rights.” It adds: “Huxe provides a mobile application that creates personalized audio content.”

CTN checked the entry on the Commission’s DMA acquisitions page on 12 October. The wording quoted here matches the Commission’s published text, which is listed under Apple and dated 9 June 2026.

One clarification on the brief. The “AI startup founded by former NotebookLM developers” in 9to5Mac’s headline is Huxe. There are not two Apple deals here. It is one deal, reported two ways.

Who are they? According to 9to5Mac and MacRumors, Huxe was founded by former Google NotebookLM team members Raiza Martin, Jason Spielman and Stephen Hughes. 9to5Mac says Martin was the NotebookLM project lead and left Google in December 2024. It says Huxe launched invite-only in June 2025 and opened to all in September, alongside a $4.6 million funding round. NotebookLM has since been renamed Gemini Notebook, both outlets say.

Huxe’s app made personalised audio. MacRumors says it built briefings from users’ emails, calendars and interests, and podcasts on topics they chose. Listeners could interrupt the AI hosts to ask questions.

Then it stopped. Huxe announced in May that it was winding down, and its service ended on May 28, per both outlets. Apple notified the Commission on June 9.

The filing leaves a lot out. MacRumors notes it does not name which employees Apple could recruit, and does not confirm that anyone was hired. No price is disclosed. Heise reported that Martin, Spielman and Hughes still listed Huxe as their employer on LinkedIn. CTN has not checked their profiles.

Apple has not commented publicly that CTN could find. Apple’s plans for the licence are unknown.

Of the three, this is the talent deal. Huxe’s product had already shut. The licence is non-exclusive, so on paper others could license the same IP. Apple gets the right to hire former NotebookLM team members, plus permission to use what they made at Huxe.

Cloudflare acquires Deno to extend the Workers model

Cloudflare’s deal is a plain acquisition. It also hits developers hardest.

On Oct 9, Cloudflare and Deno published matching posts. Deno’s post, by Ryan Dahl, says “the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare.” TechCrunch described it as an acquisition and said financial terms were not disclosed. TechCrunch also said Deno had raised $26 million in total, including a Series A led by Sequoia.

In August, Deno released celld, which Dahl describes as building on the Cloudflare Workers programming model. Cloudflare’s own runtime, workerd, is open source. But Kenton Varda of Cloudflare writes that workerd “has always had one big gap”: Durable Objects run only as a single instance, “good enough for local testing, but unable to scale.”

celld filled that gap. Varda says it was “an implementation of Workers and Durable Objects designed to be fully compatible with our own, while being focused on being self-hostable and scalable.” He writes, “Deno Land was building it for us!”

Dahl, the creator of Node.js, explains his side. With celld he wanted “one binary, written in Rust, with object storage as its only external service dependency.” He says the team is “joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.”

The plan, per Varda: Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder will lead an effort to make workerd self-hosting “a first-class supported way to build and run apps.” That means merging code and ideas from celld into workerd. Varda says more announcements are coming in the next few months.

Varda also takes on lock-in directly. He says it is “commonly claimed” that Workers was built differently to trap customers. He calls that theory wrong. He says customers such as Shopify told Cloudflare in 2022 they could not build on it unless the runtime was open source, so Cloudflare open-sourced it. “It turns out, being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business,” he writes.

The cost lands on Deno users. Deno’s post lists what changes:

  • The Deno runtime gets another year of monthly bug-fix and security releases. After that, Deno says it will end its development of the runtime. It stays open source.
  • Deno Deploy runs for six months, then shuts down. Paying customers get migration support to Cloudflare Workers.
  • JSR, the package registry, keeps running, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare.
  • Deno will keep supporting rusty_v8 and work toward integrating it into workerd.

Dahl acknowledges “this is a consequential change for people who have built on Deno.”

He also points at AI. Durable Objects, he writes, combine cheap serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets and a high-level JavaScript interface, which are “particularly useful for agent harnesses.”

Cloudflare gets a team and working code. The bigger aim is reach: it wants its programming model running in more places, including on other people’s servers.

Talent, tech or distribution: what is being bought

Deal Status Structure Main asset Price
Amazon–Decart Talks reported (WSJ via Reuters) Full acquisition, if agreed Models (Oasis, Lucy), chip optimisation, team About $7B reported; not confirmed
Apple–Huxe Notified to EU Commission, June 9 Hiring right + non-exclusive IP licence Team Not disclosed
Cloudflare–Deno Announced Oct 9 Acquisition; team joins celld, team, developer reach Not disclosed

Only one of the three, Cloudflare, has a public announcement from the buyer. Apple’s appears only in a regulator’s list. Amazon’s is anonymous sourcing.

Apple gets a team whose product had already closed. Cloudflare gets a working, self-hostable version of its own model and the engineer who created Node.js to lead it. Amazon, if the reports hold, would get models and a team that already targets its chips.

The acqui-hire trend and merger review

Apple’s Huxe deal follows a template that is now familiar.

In March 2024, Microsoft hired much of Inflection AI’s leadership and staff and agreed to pay a roughly $650 million licensing fee, Reuters reported. In June 2024, Amazon hired Adept’s CEO David Luan and other team members. CNBC reported that Amazon would license Adept’s technology, multimodal models and some datasets under a non-exclusive licence, and that Adept would keep operating as a standalone company. Reuters reported in July 2024, citing a source, that the FTC had asked Amazon for more details on the Adept deal.

In August 2024, Character.AI’s founders returned to Google with about 20% of the startup’s staff, The New York Times reported. Two people with knowledge of the deal told the Times that Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license the technology.

Regulators have noticed. On March 25, 2026, the FTC and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division asked for public comment on the premerger notification form. Their request says they have seen “an uptick in business transactions that parties are not reporting” under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act “yet which have the practical effect of eliminating a market participant.” It names “licensing agreements in combination with ‘acquihires,’ or ‘reverse acquihires,’ that leave the ‘Acquired Person’ intact but not competitively viable.”

The agencies said they are evaluating changes to address “acquihires,” “reverse acquihires,” certain non-exclusive IP licences and other novel forms. Comments closed May 26. 9to5Mac wrote that there has been little public movement on that issue since. CTN has not found a proposed rule.

The FTC document does not mention Apple or Huxe. Nothing in the record says Apple chose the structure to avoid review. Huxe had already shut its product, so there was arguably little left to buy. But the form is the one regulators have flagged, and it still came to light only through an EU disclosure.

What Big Tech’s AI deals mean for builders

If you build on a startup’s platform, read the exit terms. Deno users got a year of runtime fixes and six months of Deploy. That is more notice than many get. It is still a migration.

If you are a founder, know what a buyer values. In Huxe’s case, it was the team. In Deno’s, it was code that matched the buyer’s own model. In Decart’s, reportedly, it is models plus a stack tuned to the buyer’s chips.

If you pick infrastructure, watch portability claims. Cloudflare now argues self-hosted Workers will be a supported path. Varda and Dahl say more is coming in the next few months. Until it ships, celld and workerd self-hosting are what exist today.

Deal news may keep arriving late. Huxe surfaced four months after Apple notified Brussels.

What to watch

  • Whether Amazon or Decart confirm talks, a price, or a signed deal.
  • Any Apple comment on Huxe, or evidence of hires.
  • The FTC and DOJ’s next step on acqui-hire reporting rules.
  • Cloudflare’s promised workerd self-hosting announcements, and Deno Deploy’s shutdown date.

Sources

Method: CTN read each linked page on 12 October 2026, except where marked. The WSJ and Bloomberg reports are cited through Reuters. CTN has not contacted Amazon, Decart, Apple, Huxe’s founders, Cloudflare or Deno for this story.