Nvidia Might Fund the Company That Tried to Buy Google Chrome

Nvidia is discussing an investment in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion, The Information reported, a jump of more than 50% from the roughly $20 billion the AI search startup carried after its last round. A year ago, Perplexity made headlines trying to buy Google's Chrome browser outright with an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer, roughly double the company's own valuation at the time. Now Aravind Srinivas' company is on the receiving end of a check instead of writing one, and Nvidia is reportedly the one writing it.

The round is described as worth billions, though neither Nvidia's exact stake nor other participants have been disclosed. The two sides are also said to be discussing a technology licensing arrangement alongside the equity, which is the more unusual half of this deal.

The numbers doing the heavy lifting

Perplexity's annualized revenue has reportedly climbed past $750 million, up from under $250 million at the start of 2026, driven substantially by Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent for automating desk work, alongside more than 400 million monthly search queries and a push into its own browser, Comet. Those figures come from investor briefings, not audited financials. Perplexity hasn't published its books, which means the multiple attached to a $30 billion valuation is, for now, a matter of trust rather than verification.

The more interesting number might be Nvidia's. The chipmaker's equity commitments crossed $40 billion in 2026, and the pattern is consistent: nearly all of that money has gone to companies that turn around and buy Nvidia chips. Perplexity already sits on Nvidia's cap table alongside Jeff Bezos and SoftBank, was among the first companies named for Nvidia's Vera CPU, and Nvidia's own infrastructure VP said the chip ran agentic coding tasks about 1.5 times faster than the company's prior hardware. When Nvidia disclosed roughly $750 billion in AI-related commitments earlier this year, its credit default swaps widened to record levels, a market signal that at least some investors are pricing in real risk around how circular this money actually is.

Why this is worth watching, not just cheering

A supplier investing in its own customer, then that customer buying more of the supplier's product, isn't fraud and isn't new. But it does mean growth numbers across the AI sector are getting harder to read cleanly, since some of the revenue funding this boom is the same capital moving in a loop. Perplexity told CNBC in June it plans to list in 2028 regardless of what happens with Anthropic or OpenAI, and Nvidia reports results in November, which will be the first real test of whether this stake shows up as reported.

If your team is trying to separate genuine AI momentum from circular financing headlines before building a strategy around either, that's exactly the kind of judgment call our growth strategy work is built for, and our AI marketing services team can help you figure out which AI partners are worth betting on.