AI infrastructure specialist Crusoe and search-agent company Perplexity have signed a multi-year partnership covering the full model lifecycle – a rare wall-to-wall deal that stretches from training clusters through production inference and into Perplexity's use as an internal enterprise tool at Crusoe.
NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 For Training
The training side of the deal centres on dedicated NVIDIA GB300 NVL72-powered clusters running InfiniBand across Crusoe data centres. Perplexity, which now says it serves more than 1.5 billion questions a month, needs both the raw FLOPs and the latency-tight fabric to keep frontier model training loops from stalling.
Managed Inference For Production
On the serving side, Perplexity is moving production workloads onto Crusoe's Managed Inference service. That is the piece Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has been publicly obsessed with – "Every millisecond of latency is felt by users. Crusoe is built around exactly that constraint." Crusoe's pitch is that a single vendor owning power, compute, network and inference stack shaves the round-trip cost of a token in ways a stacked-vendor architecture cannot.
1,800 Crusoe Employees On Perplexity
The unusual leg of the deal is the reverse direction: Crusoe is rolling out Perplexity Enterprise Pro and Max across its entire 1,800-person workforce, using it for web search, internal knowledge retrieval, multi-step research and data analysis. It gives Perplexity a large-scale internal reference customer, and it hands Crusoe employees an in-house tool built on the same clusters they operate.
Why It Matters
The AI infrastructure market has been consolidating around long-duration supply deals. Crusoe's own $3.9 billion Series F was raised on the premise that customers would sign multi-year full-lifecycle contracts. This is one of them, arriving inside a week of the round closing. NVIDIA's Dion Harris said the pairing lets Perplexity "train, fine-tune, and serve frontier models in production with the speed and efficiency agentic AI demands."
Neither company disclosed contract value. Perplexity's investor talks at a $30 billion valuation earlier this year have already priced in a heavy compute build.
Reporting based on coverage from GlobeNewswire, Crusoe newsroom, AIwire and Investing.com.