Nvidia's Perplexity talks add another customer to its circular financing problem

Nvidia has started discussions to invest in Perplexity’s next funding round at a valuation of over $30 billion, according to a report from The Information.

The deal would boost the valuation of the AI search startup by more than 50% in a year. It would also provide another Nvidia-backed customer with fresh capital.

The talks surfaced on Sunday, sourced to people familiar with the discussions.

Perplexity revenue triples while its valuation climbs past $30B

The proposed round would value Perplexity at more than $30 billion, up from its $20 billion valuation last September. That is an increase of more than 50% in about a year.

Nvidia is pondering whether to join. Both Nvidia and Perplexity declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

Perplexity’s investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Japan’s SoftBank Group.

The company’s annualized revenue has grown to over $750 million from less than $250 million at the beginning of the year, tripling in about eight months.

Perplexity Computer sells to professionals to automate tasks on their machines. The growing demand for AI search and autonomous agents is feeding investors’ appetite.

Perplexity is aiming to go public in 2028, a timeline CEO Aravind Srinivas detailed in a June interview. The company would move ahead regardless of how the market treats the planned listings of OpenAI and Anthropic, he said.

Regulators flag Nvidia’s habit of funding its own customers

Nvidia has invested in companies that are also its customers or suppliers. The list includes cloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius and AI data firm Mercor, which is reported to be in talks with Nvidia at a valuation of $20 billion.

Critics call the arrangement circular financing. The supplier funds the buyer, the buyer spends that money again on the supplier’s products, and demand can look stronger than it is.

In its 2026 Annual Report, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) listed circular financing as one of the three greatest risks to global financial stability.

As Cryptopolitan has reported, the Bank of England (BOE) has warned that the speed of AI investment is unprecedented in history.

Chips are “productive, they’re long-lived, they’re fungible, they’re flexible,” CEO Jensen Huang said of the financing program. The company guarantees up to 25% of its chips’ residual value if resale falls short at the end of a

Earlier this year, Perplexity agreed to run workloads on Microsoft’s Azure for $750 million. The company inked that deal while fighting Amazon in court over shopping features in its AI tools, Cryptopolitan earlier reported.

Amazon Web Services would continue to be the company’s preferred cloud provider, a Perplexity spokesperson said at the time.

Nvidia shares fell 2.16% to $210.09 in Monday afternoon trading, down from Friday’s $214.72 close.

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