By Omor Ibne Ehsan
Publication Date: 2026-08-27 15:05:00
Nvidia is writing a check to fund a company that turns around and buys Nvidia chips, and Jensen Huang sees nothing circular about that arrangement. Whether Perplexity’s explosive revenue growth justifies a $30 billion valuation depends on math that neither…
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) is reportedly in talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion, up from roughly $20 billion in September 2025. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has discussed a 2028 IPO.
Annualized revenue has climbed above $750 million from less than $250 million at the start of 2026, helped by demand for the Perplexity Computer AI agent. Investors would be paying roughly 40 times annualized revenue, and a separate $750 million Microsoft Azure agreement shows how quickly that growth consumes compute.
Nvidia closed at $209.66 with a market capitalization of roughly $5.16 trillion. The question is whether Nvidia is backing a credible AI search challenger or paying a lavish price to feed the ecosystem that buys its chips. The answer is both, and the second reason matters more than Nvidia bulls tend to admit.
A Round That Doubles as Demand Creation
Jensen Huang has already named Perplexity as a customer. On the Q1 call, he grouped it with “Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, SpaceX XAI, Meta, Microsoft AI, TML, Reflection, Perplexity, Cursor” as frontier labs building on Nvidia. That list is also a customer roster. Every one of these companies buys or rents Nvidia…
