Nvidia is discussing an investment in Perplexity as part of an equity round valuing the AI search company above $30 billion, per The Information via Yahoo Finance. Perplexity was valued near $20 billion after a round finalized last year, so the mark would rise more than 50% in about twelve months. Annualized revenue has climbed above $750 million from under $250 million at the start of the year, helped by Perplexity Computer, its cloud agent for professional tasks, per Benzinga. The Information also reported Nvidia weighed a licensing arrangement or hiring part of the team instead of taking equity.
The relationship is the part that matters. Nvidia has held a position in Perplexity since 2023, and in July Perplexity committed to running its agent workloads on Nvidia's Vera CPUs. So Nvidia is contemplating writing a larger check into a company that has already committed to buying its silicon. The revenue Perplexity generates on Nvidia hardware helps justify the valuation at which Nvidia would be investing.
We have tracked this structure all year and it keeps widening. Nvidia is in talks to guarantee $250 billion of OpenAI's Ohio project, it prepaid Amkor $1.5 billion for packaging capacity, and this month it lined up more than $500 billion with six Wall Street firms using compute as collateral. Equity in the customers is the smallest and oldest piece of that architecture, and also the most direct. Each individual deal is defensible. Together they mean a growing share of Nvidia's demand is demand Nvidia helped finance.
The revenue growth here is real, from under $250 million to above $750 million inside eight months, and that is what a 50% markup is actually pricing. The question for anyone underwriting the round is how much of that trajectory depends on capital and compute supplied by the same investor setting the price.
Bottom Line
Nvidia is considering paying up for equity in a customer that buys its chips, days before its own earnings. Watch whether the round closes as equity or as the licensing deal Nvidia also considered, because the two say very different things about what Nvidia thinks it is buying.