AI Startup Perplexity Offers to Buy Google’s Chrome Browser for $34.5 Billion

Perplexity, the AI startup answerable for the eponymous chatbot and LLM-powered search engine, has made a proper bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser.The proposed $34.5 billion deal would eclipse Perplexity’s present valuation. In July, the corporate was valued at $18 billion — simply over half the quantity of the proposed bid. The corporate has mentioned that a number of buyers are keen to again the Chrome deal. Perplexity’s bid comes after Google misplaced an antitrust swimsuit initiated by the US Division of Justice final yr.The choose within the case dominated that Google maintains an unlawful monopoly within the web search business, and one potential treatment into consideration can be for Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser. The Division of Justice’s submitting maintained that this could create a extra equal taking part in discipline for search engine opponents.Google has not detailed any plans to divest itself of Chrome or change its enterprise mannequin. The corporate’s response mentioned the ruling was emblematic of a “radical interventionist agenda” and vowed to combat the choice.The choose’s ruling on a treatment is anticipated this month.Representatives for Google and Perplexity didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.Perplexity has itself been eyed by massive tech firms with an curiosity within the startup. Meta approached Perplexity for an acquisition earlier this yr however a deal by no means materialized.If the plucky startup had been to accumulate the Chrome browser, it could give it a massive benefit within the AI arms race — the place it is competing with a lot larger fish, like Google, Meta and OpenAI. Whereas Perplexity does not have comparable quantities of capital to expend on signing engineers, proudly owning the biggest search engine on the planet will assist construct the corporate’s signature agentic search engine AI fashions.Perplexity’s newest growth is Comet, an AI-powered search engine of the corporate’s personal making that launched final month.