Nvidia is in talks to back Perplexity at more than $30bn

Nvidia has been discussing an investment in Perplexity that would value the AI search company at more than $30bn, according to The Information, which reported that the two sides also considered a technology licensing arrangement alongside the equity cheque.

The talks are the latest turn in a relationship that already runs deeper than the usual investor-and-customer arrangement, since Perplexity was among the first named takers for Nvidia’s Vera CPU.

At more than $30bn, the valuation would represent a jump of over 50% on the roughly $20bn Perplexity carried after its last reported round, and it would land the company among the most richly priced private AI businesses in the world. The round itself is described as worth billions of dollars, though neither the size of Nvidia’s proposed stake nor the identity of the other participants has been reported.

Neither company has commented publicly, and it is not clear whether the licensing component is still live or was set aside during the negotiations.

What makes the discussions unremarkable, in one sense, is how routine this kind of cheque has become for Nvidia. Its equity commitments passed $40bn in 2026 alone, spread across model developers, neoclouds, and infrastructure companies that, almost without exception, buy Nvidia silicon with the money.

That circularity has started to attract a different sort of attention. When the company announced roughly $750bn of AI-related commitments, its own credit default swaps widened to record levels, a signal from the debt market that the arrangement looks less like diversification than like a supplier financing its own order book.

Perplexity is an unusually visible example of the type. Founded in 2022 and led by Aravind Srinivas, it built a conversational search product that answers queries directly rather than returning a page of blue links and has spent the past two years trying to make it durable enough to justify its price.

In August 2025, the company made an unsolicited $34.5bn offer for Google’s Chrome browser, a bid roughly double its own valuation at the time, which Google never entertained. It has since pushed its own AI browser, Comet, as the vehicle for what Srinivas calls agentic browsing.

The competitive picture has not softened while all this was going on. Google has folded conversational answers into its own results page, OpenAI has pushed ChatGPT further into search and shipped a browser of its own, and both arrive with distribution that Perplexity has to buy or build.

Perplexity has not disclosed audited figures, and the widely circulated estimates of its annualised run rate come from investor briefings and secondary reporting rather than the company itself, which makes any multiple attached to a $30bn valuation an exercise in faith.

Nvidia is already on the cap table, having taken part in earlier rounds that also drew in Jeff Bezos. A licensing deal, had it been agreed, would have been a rarer move, giving Perplexity access to Nvidia technology on terms that sit outside the ordinary customer relationship, and giving Nvidia a stake in how AI search actually gets built rather than merely in the hardware underneath it.

For now, the round is unconfirmed, which is worth holding onto. Reports of AI valuations have a habit of arriving well before term sheets are signed, and Perplexity itself has been the subject of several such reports over the past 18 months, at $14bn, at $18bn, and at $20bn, each of which arrived with people familiar with the matter attached and each of which took months to settle into a number anyone would put their name to.

Nvidia reports its next quarterly results in November. Whether a Perplexity stake shows up in the investment line by then will say more about the pace of this cycle than the valuation itself does.