Nvidia in talks to back Perplexity at $30B+

Nvidia is discussing an equity investment in Perplexity as part of a round that would value the AI search company at more than $30 billion, The Information reported August 24, citing people with knowledge of the talks. That would be a jump of more than 50% from the roughly $20 billion valuation Perplexity finalized about a year ago. Perplexity’s annualized revenue has climbed to more than $750 million from under $250 million at the start of the year, growth the company attributes partly to Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based agent that automates computer tasks for professional users. Neither Nvidia nor Perplexity has confirmed the round; Perplexity declined to comment and Nvidia did not immediately respond.

The talks extend a pattern: Nvidia has taken stakes in Poolside, Groq, Enfabrica, Fireworks, Sarvam, Safe Superintelligence and Firmus over the past year, and CEO Jensen Huang has said publicly that he uses Perplexity daily. Critics including Ed Zitron argue the strategy amounts to Nvidia “bailing out anyone in the AI industry” to keep them buying compute, since Nvidia’s own revenue depends on downstream demand for GPUs staying strong.

What it means for you

This is the same reverse-acquihire and strategic-investment playbook Nvidia has now run across Groq, Enfabrica and Poolside, applied to an application-layer company instead of a model or hardware startup. If you’re pricing Perplexity’s enterprise or API offerings against competitors, remember that a chunk of its rising valuation is Nvidia underwriting its own demand pipeline, not an independent market verdict on the product.