Nvidia Is in Talks to Back Perplexity at Over $30 Billion
Nvidia is reportedly discussing an investment in the AI search startup that would value it above $30 billion, more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.
Nvidia is discussing investing in Perplexity, the AI search startup, at a valuation exceeding $30 billion, according to The Information. Nothing is finalized and neither company has confirmed the talks, but if the round closes at that number it would mark a jump of more than 50 percent from Perplexity’s roughly $20 billion valuation about a year ago.
Perplexity has been growing fast: its annualized revenue has climbed above $750 million, up from under $250 million at the start of the year. Part of that growth reportedly comes from Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent the company built to automate computer-based tasks for professional users, rather than just answering search queries. An agent, in this context, is software that can take multi-step actions on your behalf, not just respond to a single question.
What’s actually going on here: Nvidia doesn’t just sell the chips that power AI, it’s increasingly taking direct equity stakes in the companies that use them, from OpenAI to Anthropic-adjacent hardware deals to, potentially, Perplexity. That’s a shift from being a hardware supplier to being a stakeholder across the entire AI stack, sometimes called the “compute landlord” strategy. For Nvidia, backing companies that spend billions on its chips is a way to keep demand strong and get a cut of the upside if any of them becomes a breakout winner. For Perplexity specifically, it’s competing directly against Google Search, ChatGPT search features and a crowded field of AI answer engines, so a fresh valuation bump and a marquee backer like Nvidia would be a strong signal to the market that it’s still in the race.
What this means for you: if you use Perplexity as a search tool, this news alone changes nothing about the product tomorrow, though a bigger war chest usually means faster feature development and more aggressive expansion. If you’re watching the AI industry more broadly, this is worth filing alongside the pattern of chipmakers and cloud providers investing directly in the AI companies that are also their biggest customers, a circular flow of money that some analysts have flagged as a risk if growth ever slows. For most people, the practical takeaway is simple: AI search tools are still very much in a land-grab phase, and the money behind them keeps getting bigger.
Sources
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