How Much Is Perplexity Really Paying For Chrome

Perplexity AI, one of the artificial intelligence startups of the moment, has offered Google a wild amount of money to buy the Chrome web browser. According to The Wall Street Journal, it has proposed to pay no less than 34,500 million dollars to the Mountain View corporation to keep its software.

In this way, Perplexity would try to position itself as a potential candidate to keep Chrome if the United States forces Google to sell it. Let’s not forget that in 2024 the justice system in that country declared the Californian firm a monopoly and presented possible measures to break it. Among them, forcing it to divest itself of the browser and Android.

The curious thing about the case is that the figure that Perplexity is willing to pay for Google Chrome is almost double its own current valuation. As mentioned, the artificial intelligence startup is valued at about 18,000 million dollars, so the financing of the potential acquisition would be done entirely through investors who would supposedly already be on board the project.

The report indicates that Perplexity made its bid for Chrome in a letter to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google. In it, the firm would have promoted itself as a “capable and independent operator” to guarantee the future of the browser. Likewise, it would have committed to keeping Google as the default search engine of the application and, more importantly, to continuing with the development of Chromium, the open-source project that serves as the basis for other browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi, among others.

Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5 billion

It’s still unclear if Perplexity is serious about this offer or if it’s just a PR prank to be in the news, knowing that Google isn’t willing to sell Chrome. The AI startup led by Aravind Srinivas has earned a name not only for its developments but also for its grandiloquent proposals.

Last March, for example, Perplexity proposed buying TikTok and releasing its algorithm as open source. However, so far that option came to nothing and was never spoken of as something real again.

Early last month, Perplexity launched Comet, its own AI-powered web browser. So the startup’s interest in expanding into this segment is quite evident. But from there to having what it takes to keep the most famous and used browser in the world, there is a big difference.

In the past, Google has strongly disagreed with the idea of being forced to sell Chrome. For his part, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of the company, described this matter as “a terrible idea.”

“We’ve invested billions of dollars in Chrome and Android. Chrome is a secure, fast, and free browser, and its open-source code forms the backbone of numerous competing browsers. […] Few companies would have the ability or incentive to keep them open source or invest in them at the same level as we do,” the Californians remarked.

Even if Google agreed to sell Chrome, it’s still unknown how much money it might ask. According to estimates, the browser could be worth up to $50 billion, so Perplexity’s offer would be insufficient. It would also be necessary to see if an agreement between the parties would be approved regulatorily. Let’s not forget that the startup has received lawsuits from different companies and media outlets for using their data without authorization to train its AI. Among them are NewsCorp and Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper.

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