Nvidia is discussing a new investment in Perplexity that would value the AI search company above $30 billion, a premium exceeding 50 percent over what it fetched in its previous funding round a year earlier, The Information reported. Nothing is signed. The talks are ongoing, and terms could still shift before any deal closes.
The number behind the price tag is revenue. Annualized sales at Perplexity have tripled over the past year, climbing from $250 million to upward of $750 million. Part of that growth traces to Perplexity Computer, its agent built to run multi-step tasks on a user’s behalf, which likely pushes token consumption (and the revenue tied to it) well past what a standard chatbot generates.
Nvidia once weighed a simpler path into Perplexity: an acqui-hire that would have brought over its technology and staff outright. That the current talks center on a minority stake instead suggests Nvidia would rather keep Perplexity independent and buying chips than absorb it into its own product line, a choice that also avoids the regulatory scrutiny an outright takeover would invite. Perplexity joined Nvidia’s Nemotron Coalition in March, an initiative pushing open-weight alternatives to Chinese-made models.
A round at this size would extend a fundraising history that already exceeds $1.7 billion. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is weighing an IPO around 2028, CNBC has reported, a timeline that would put a Nvidia-backed price tag on the record years before any public listing.
The talks fit a pattern. Nvidia has recently backed Poolside, Groq at a $20 billion valuation, and Enfabrica at $900 million, each deal reinforcing its position as one of the AI industry’s largest financial backers. Worth naming directly: much of that invested capital cycles back to Nvidia as revenue whenever the companies it funds spend the money on Nvidia’s own chips. AI Insiders covered the same mechanism last week in Nvidia’s $6 billion deal to license Poolside’s model factory. A Perplexity stake would apply that same playbook to a company burning tokens on agent workloads rather than model training runs.
If the round closes near $30 billion, it becomes Nvidia’s fourth publicly reported AI equity bet in recent months. Each one raises the same question: how much of that capital represents genuine diversification, and how much simply returns as chip orders. Anyone evaluating Perplexity as an infrastructure partner should track whether this round actually closes before assuming its balance sheet, or its independence from Nvidia, has changed.
The Decoder (Matthias Bastian), citing The Information and CNBC, reported this August 24, 2026.
