NVIDIA Corp. is reportedly in advanced discussions to invest fresh capital into Perplexity AI at a valuation exceeding $30 billion, extending an existing backing relationship that already places the answer engine among the chipmaker's most closely tied application-layer partners. The Information first reported the talks on August 23, saying a deal would represent roughly a 50% step-up from Perplexity's $20 billion round finalized last September.
A licensing-to-equity playbook, again
The move mirrors NVIDIA's recent choreography with other AI-native customers. Just days earlier the chipmaker committed $6 billion to license Poolside's model-development software and $1 billion in equity at a $12 billion valuation, and it has held technical-partnership talks with Korean chip designer Rebellions. Sources told The Information NVIDIA initially explored paying billions to license Perplexity's search stack and hire specific staff before pivoting to a straight equity check.
Revenue trajectory is doing the work
Perplexity is telling investors its annualized revenue run rate has climbed above $750 million from under $250 million at the start of 2026, powered largely by Perplexity Computer, the cloud-based general-purpose agent released earlier this year. The company's Samsung Bixby integration brings its answer engine to roughly 800 million devices, and Comet, its Chromium-based AI browser, is available for free.
Why NVIDIA keeps writing checks
NVIDIA's investment logic is defensive as much as strategic. As the dominant supplier of AI inference silicon, it does not want the search layer — a massive compute consumer — drifting toward AMD MI300, Cerebras or in-house accelerators. Anchor investments in Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Poolside and Safe Superintelligence create a self-reinforcing demand cycle for its GPUs. In August the company also assembled a $500 billion Wall Street financing package to fund customer AI-factory buildouts.
What still has to close
Neither NVIDIA nor Perplexity has confirmed the talks, and the exact ticket size has not been disclosed. Perplexity is separately running a $750 million commitment with Microsoft Azure for compute, and CEO Aravind Srinivas has telegraphed a 2028 IPO target. Related coverage: NVIDIA's Poolside deal and the reported NVIDIA-Hugging Face talks.
Reporting based on coverage from The Information, SiliconANGLE, Bloomberg and Reuters.