Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at $30B-plus valuation
The funding treadmill keeps spinning, and Nvidia keeps footing the bill. This time the check is reportedly headed to Perplexity, the AI search upstart that has quietly turned itself into one of the sector's fastest-growing revenue stories.
Nvidia is negotiating an investment in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion — more than 50 percent higher than the company's last funding round a year ago — according to a report from The Information. Perplexity's annualized revenue has tripled from $250 million to over $750 million over that stretch, and much of the surge traces to Perplexity Computer, the $200-a-month AI agent that wraps rival models into one autonomous workflow system. The growth fits a broader industry pattern we keep seeing: agentic AI burns tokens at a pace that turns the technology into its own biggest customer, exactly the sort of usage Nvidia wants on its silicon.
A deal would cement Nvidia's place as the AI economy's most prolific backer. The chipmaker has already done similar arrangements with Poolside, a roughly $20 billion agreement with Groq that looks more like an acquisition than a stake, and a $900 million deal with Enfabrica — and a large share of that capital flows right back to Nvidia when portfolio companies buy its GPUs. For Perplexity the timing looks deliberate: CEO Aravind Srinivas has said the company is weighing an IPO around 2028, and Nvidia had previously floated an acqui-hire to absorb its technology and staff. An investment is the gentler route that keeps Srinivas in charge while locking in a powerful ally. Perplexity has raised more than $1.7 billion to date, and its own strategic appetite is just as visible — the company runs Perplexity Computer to steer real tasks and turned to Nvidia's Nemotron Coalition earlier this year to push open models.
The big takeaway is that the most valuable thing in AI right now isn't the model, it's the distribution and the workload that generates recurring token spend. Nvidia strategically owns both sides of that equation — the compute and the fast-scaling consumer applications that justify buying more of it. The Perplexity negotiation is early and unconfirmed, and no deal is final until it's signed, but it signals where the second half of this build-out is heading: the GPU king fortifying its moat on the demand side, one high-growth AI app at a time.
Do you think Nvidia's strategy of investing in its own biggest customers helps or hurts the AI ecosystem? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: The Decoder · The Information
