Nvidia Doubles Down on Perplexity with Multi-Billion Dollar Bet
Nvidia is reportedly considering another investment in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion, deepening its ties to one of the fastest-growing AI search and agent startups. This move highlights Nvidia's aggressive effort to place its hardware at the center of companies building next-generation AI applications.
The Information reported that Nvidia is discussing participation in a new Perplexity funding round valuing the startup over 50% above its roughly $20 billion valuation from last year. This implies a valuation of roughly 40 times annualized revenue, underscoring growth investors expect and the risk Nvidia would be taking.
Nvidia's strategic investment is useful because Perplexity plans to adopt Nvidia's Vera CPUs for agent workloads. Vera was designed specifically for agentic AI tasks such as tool calls, code execution, and data processing alongside GPUs. If Perplexity's AI agents continue scaling, Nvidia could benefit from increased demand for its CPUs and broader accelerated-computing platform.
Investors will be looking to Nvidia's fiscal second-quarter earnings on August 26th for evidence of strong demand as AI spending broadens into inference and autonomous agents. Faster agent adoption would strengthen Nvidia's ecosystem strategy, but repeated investments at rapidly rising private valuations could raise questions about capital allocation.