AWS still remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud provider, the start-up clarified.
AI-powered search engine Perplexity has signed a three-year, $750m deal with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service, Bloomberg has reported.
Sources told the publication that the deal will enable Perplexity to deploy AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry services, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Perplexity has been a long-term user of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the company told Bloomberg that AWS remains its “preferred” cloud infrastructure provider.
For Microsoft, this deal boosts its efforts to position Azure as the go-to place to build AI applications.
“We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic,” a Perplexity spokesperson told the publication. “AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks,” they added.
Founded in 2022 by Arvind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity was recently valued at $20bn after a $200m raise last September. The fast growing start-up had reportedly made a previous raise just months before.
Perplexity is taking on the likes of Google by scraping the internet to provide conversational answers to search queries. And in doing so, the start-up has inevitably stepped on the toes of major corporations in the Search sector as well as content publishers.
Despite going “all-in” on AWS, according to comments from Srinivas in 2023, Perplexity managed to engage itself in a legal fight with Amazon after the start-up allegedly allowed its AI browser agent Comet to make purchases for its users online. In its November lawsuit, Amazon alleged that Perplexity was committing “computer fraud” by failing to disclose when Comet is shopping on a real person’s behalf.
Although, companies such as Google and OpenAI are also attempting to make direct purchases through their AI chatbots possible, signalling a major shift in online purchasing trends.
Meanwhile, in June, BBC threatened to take legal action against the company for allegedly scraping its content to train its AI models. In 2024, the New York Times sent Perplexity a ‘cease and desist’ notice, demanding that the start-up stop using its content for generative AI. Similar allegations of content scraping were made by tech magazine Wired and Forbes.
Moreover, in the four short years since launching, Perplexity also managed to get delisted by Cloudflare – one of the largest internet security players – for stealth crawling for content by circumventing websites’ network block.
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