By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-01-31 03:30:00
Perplexity has signed a $750 million deal with Microsoft Azure. With this deal, the AI startup is expanding its business beyond its long-time cloud partner, Amazon. The three-year commitment will allow Perplexity to deploy AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry service, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, a report claimed, citing people familiar with the deal, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. However, a Perplexity spokesperson has confirmed that as part of the Microsoft deal, the company hasn’t shifted spending from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has long been the startup’s primary cloud provider.In a statement to Bloomberg, a Perplexity spokesperson said, “We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic. AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks.”This deal comes after Perplexity and Amazon got engaged in a legal fight last year. In November 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity to prevent the startup from allowing consumers to use its AI tools to shop on Amazon’s online marketplace. Perplexity responded by calling Amazon a bully and its actions “a threat to user choice”. Meanwhile, that same month, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said his company had received “hundreds of millions” in commitments from AWS.Perplexity built much of its business on AWS, using Amazon’s Bedrock…
