By Judith Murphy
Publication Date: 2026-10-09 19:02:00
Is Perplexity worth 50% more than it was eight months ago? That’s the number The Information says Nvidia is weighing, and no one’s confirmed the revenue behind it.
Nvidia is discussing an equity investment in Perplexity AI that would value the search startup at more than $30 billion, according to a report from The Information. That’s up from roughly $20 billion a year ago and about $23 billion in a Series E round that closed in January 2026. No deal is final, and the size of Nvidia’s check hasn’t been disclosed. Neither company has commented publicly.
The number driving the talks is Perplexity’s annualized revenue run rate, which has crossed $750 million, up from under $250 million at the start of 2026. That’s a tripling in under a year. A chunk of that growth comes from Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent launched in April that lets users hand off computer tasks like filling forms or booking travel to an AI model instead of doing them by hand.
Here’s where the story gets murkier. Perplexity signed a three-year, $750 million commitment with Microsoft in January to run frontier models, including ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, through Azure Foundry. That figure gets cited constantly alongside the revenue number, and it shouldn’t be. It’s spending, not income: Perplexity is the one paying Microsoft, not the other way around. Conflating the two makes Perplexity’s business look even more impressive than the revenue figure alone already does.
Even taking…