By Nileena Sunil
Publication Date: 2026-01-30 16:43:00
Artificial Intelligence firm signed a $750 million agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service according to Bloomberg. This deal will allow Perplexity to run a range of AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry program, including systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.
“We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic,” a Perplexity spokesperson said. The spokesperson also added that the company hasn’t shifted its spending from Amazon Web Services, long the startup’s main cloud provider, as part of the Microsoft deal.
“AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks,” he said.
Perplexity is one of the most highly valued AI startups, however it faces strong competition from Google and OpenAI. It has also been unable to raise as much capital as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have recently engaged in a wave of infrastructure deals.
READ: Aravind Srinivas: The Indian American researcher taking on big tech with Perplexity (
Big companies typically rent cloud services from multiple partners, both to get access to unique services and to limit their reliance on any single vendor. That phenomenon has accelerated during the AI age, as businesses experiment with new tools and sign deals with model builders and the cloud providers whose servers run that software.
Perplexity built much of…
