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Nvidia Weighs Perplexity Investment at Valuation Above $30 Billion

The proposed financing would deepen Nvidia’s relationship with an AI company that is already an investor-backed customer of its computing technology.

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  • Nvidia is discussing an investment in Perplexity as part of an equity funding round that would value the AI search company at more than $30 billion, according to The Information.

    The proposed valuation would be more than 50% above the $20 billion figure attached to Perplexity’s previous financing in September 2025. No agreement has been announced, and the size and terms of Nvidia’s potential investment have not been disclosed.

    The Information reported that Perplexity’s annualized revenue had increased from less than $250 million at the beginning of 2026 to more than $750 million. Part of the increase reportedly came from Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent used by professionals to automate research and other computer tasks.

    Those figures have not been published in audited financial statements. A $30 billion valuation would equal 40 times annualized revenue of $750 million. The actual multiple could be higher or lower because both figures were reported only as thresholds.

    The Information also reported that Nvidia had previously considered paying Perplexity billions of dollars to license some of its technology and hire some employees. It was unclear whether that alternative remained under consideration.

    The potential investment would deepen an existing relationship. Nvidia is already a Perplexity investor, while Perplexity said in July that it planned to use Nvidia’s Vera central processing units for AI agent workloads.

    Perplexity vice president Nate Kupp told Reuters that the company’s tests found Vera completed agent coding tasks about 1.5 times faster than traditional processors.

    Nvidia subsequently described the workload as cloning a software repository and running its test suite in sandboxes. The result came from a Perplexity test against x86 processors and was not independently benchmarked.

    Nvidia positions Vera as a complement to its graphics processors. AI agents repeatedly call models, execute code, retrieve information and analyze results. Slow CPU work during those stages can leave more expensive GPUs waiting for the next model request.

    Perplexity is therefore both a software investment and a prospective customer for Nvidia’s expanding hardware portfolio. An equity stake could give Nvidia greater exposure to the application layer of AI while providing Perplexity with capital to finance growth and its substantial computing requirements.

    That relationship also requires careful interpretation. An investment in a company that plans to adopt Nvidia technology would increase commercial interdependence, but it would not establish that the financing proceeds will be spent on Nvidia hardware.

    Perplexity has a substantial agreement with another infrastructure provider. Earlier in 2026, it signed a three-year, $750 million agreement to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud service and Foundry platform. Perplexity said Amazon Web Services remained its main cloud provider.

    Chief Executive Aravind Srinivas said in June that Perplexity planned to pursue an initial public offering in 2028. Before then, investors will have to determine whether its reported revenue growth can be sustained and whether Perplexity Computer can build a durable professional market against products from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft.

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