By Matthew Broersma
Publication Date: 2026-01-30 09:00:00
AI search start-up Perplexity is to pay Microsoft $750 million (£545m) to use the Windows developer’s Azure cloud service, Bloomberg reported, moving beyond its previous focus on Amazon Web Services.
The three-year commitment using Microsoft’s Foundry service will give Perplexity access to AI models including those from Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI.
Legal row
A Perplexity spokesperson said the start-up is not reducing spending on AWS services.
The spokesperson said AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider and that it plans to announce an expansion of the partnership in the coming weeks.
Perplexity in the past has been a prominent partner for AWS, but the relationship with Amazon soured late last year with Amazon suing Perplexity to stop it from sending automated agents to make purchases on Amazon’s e-commerce platform on behalf of Perplexity users.
Perplexity said Amazon was bullying a smaller company.
Amazon also makes use of AI tools to send purchases to third-party platforms, at times without informing those platforms or obtaining their consent.
Cloud boost
The deal is a boost for Microsoft, as it competes with Amazon, Google, Oracle and others to grab business from AI firms.
It’s common for AI start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI to use multiple providers as they seek a broad and diverse compute base.
Start-ups and large tech companies alike say there is far less computing power available than they…
