By Suhasini Srinivasaragavan
Publication Date: 2026-01-30 10:07:00
AWS still remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud provider, the start-up clarified.
AI-powered search engine Perplexity has signed a three-year, $750m deal with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service, Bloomberg has reported.
Sources told the publication that the deal will enable Perplexity to deploy AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry services, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Perplexity has been a long-term user of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the company told Bloomberg that AWS remains its “preferred” cloud infrastructure provider.
For Microsoft, this deal boosts its efforts to position Azure as the go-to place to build AI applications.
“We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic,” a Perplexity spokesperson told the publication. “AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks,” they added.
Founded in 2022 by Arvind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity was recently valued at $20bn after a $200m raise last September. The fast growing start-up had reportedly made a previous raise just months before.
Perplexity is taking on the likes of Google by scraping the internet to provide conversational answers to search queries. And in doing so, the start-up has inevitably stepped on the toes of major corporations in the Search…
