Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at a $30 billion-plus valuation

Nvidia is negotiating an investment in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion, more than 50% higher than the AI search company's last funding round a year ago, The Decoder reported, citing The Information.

Perplexity runs an AI-powered answer engine that competes directly with Google Search and OpenAI's ChatGPT, replacing the traditional list of blue links with a single conversational response drawn from live web sources. Founded in 2022, the company has grown into one of the most closely watched challengers to Google's search dominance. It has raised more than $1.7 billion to date, and CEO Aravind Srinivas is reportedly considering an IPO around 2028.

Perplexity's annualized revenue has tripled over the past year, climbing from $250 million to more than $750 million. The company credits part of that growth to Perplexity Computer, an AI agent built for automated tasks. The jump likely ties to the higher token consumption that agentic systems demand, since an agent working through a multi-step task calls a model far more often than a single chat query does, and each of those calls runs on Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia had previously considered an acqui-hire, bringing in Perplexity's technology and staff outright rather than taking a stake. The two companies already have a working relationship: Perplexity joined Nvidia's Nemotron Coalition in March, an initiative that promotes open AI models as a counterweight to Chinese development efforts and gives member companies access to Nvidia's own Nemotron model family. That kind of technical alignment often precedes a formal investment in the AI sector, where chipmakers increasingly back the software built on top of their own hardware.

• Valuation under discussion: above $30 billion, more than 50% higher than Perplexity's last round
• Perplexity's annualized revenue: tripled from $250 million to over $750 million
• Total capital Perplexity has raised to date: more than $1.7 billion
• CEO Aravind Srinivas is reportedly considering an IPO around 2028

The deal would extend Nvidia's role as one of the AI industry's biggest financial backers. The chipmaker has struck similar investments recently with Poolside, which builds foundation models for software development, with Groq, which makes rival AI inference chips, at a $20 billion valuation, and with Enfabrica, which builds high-speed networking chips for AI data centers, at $900 million. The spread shows Nvidia investing across the AI stack rather than limiting itself to companies that only buy its chips. Nvidia's financial exposure to the sector runs deeper still: the company recently guaranteed up to $105 billion tied to OpenAI's Ohio data center lease.

Much of the capital Nvidia commits to portfolio companies returns to Nvidia as revenue once those companies spend it on chips, a circular flow that has drawn scrutiny as valuations across the AI sector climb. For Nvidia, backing an AI-native company like Perplexity serves a dual purpose: it gains exposure to Perplexity's revenue growth while helping ensure that growth keeps running on Nvidia GPUs rather than a competitor's chips. Perplexity has not confirmed the talks, and terms could still change before any deal closes.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.