AI-powered search engine Perplexity has signed a three year $750 million cloud computing agreement with Microsoft, reports Bloomberg.

This is the first cloud agreement Perplexity has signed outside of Amazon Web Services (AWS), of which it has a long-term partnership.

Citing sources familiar with the deal but requesting anonymity, the deal will also enable Perplexity to deploy AI models through the Microsoft Foundry service.

“We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI, and Anthropic,” a Perplexity spokesperson told Bloomberg. “AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks.”

The deal with Microsoft is notable, given that co-founder Arvind Srinivas said in 2023 that the company was “all-in” on AWS, however, it since had a legal battle with Amazon related to Perplexity’s AI browser agent Comet making purchases for users online, which Amazon alleged was “computer fraud” as it was not clear whether the shopping is on behalf of an actual human being.

Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Arvind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, and valued at $20bn after a $200 million raise in September 2025. Nvidia is an investor in the company.

News of the deal comes just after Microsoft posted its quarterly earnings. Despite continued growth across the business and in its Azure cloud segment, investor concern remains apparent regarding high capex for AI infrastructure, and the proportion of the company’s remaining performance obligation being heavily skewed to OpenAI.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/perplexity-signs-750m-cloud-agreement-with-microsoft/