Perplexity AI, the startup behind the AI service with the same name, has apparently made an offer to buy Chrome from Google. The amount it’s willing to pay? A whopping $34.5 billion, according to a new Reuters report.
This isn’t the first time Perplexity has made a headline-grabbing offer – back in January, it also said it wanted to buy TikTok’s US operations. Obviously, nothing came of that (at least so far). Perplexity hasn’t revealed how it plans to fund its acquisition of Chrome, simply stating that multiple funds have offered to finance the deal in full (without naming any names). It has so far raised about $1 billion in funding for its AI chatbot, and that’s obviously far from what it’s offering here.
For the Chrome bid, OpenAI, Yahoo, and private-equity firm Apollo Global Management have also expressed interest so far. All of this stems from regulatory pressure in the US mounting towards Google selling off Chrome so that it has less of a grip on the industry.
For its part, Google so far hasn’t actually offered up Chrome for sale, and plans to appeal a US court ruling from last year that found it has an unlawful monopoly in online search. The US Justice Department has sought a Chrome sell-off as part of that case’s remedies. A federal judge is expected to issue a ruling on remedies in this case sometime this month.
Perplexity recently launched its own AI-infused browser, Comet. Its main selling point is being able to perform tasks on your behalf. Obviously, buying Chrome would allow Perplexity to leverage its more than three billion users for its AI services, and that would allow it to better compete with the elephant in the AI room – OpenAI (which, incidentally, is also working on an AI browser of its own).
Perplexity promises to keep the underlying Chromium code open source, and invest $3 billion over two years in the browser without making any changes to Chrome’s default search engine. The company thinks its acquisition of Chrome would preserve user choice and ease future competition concerns.