7 days ago
AI startup Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B
San Francisco-based AI startup Perplexity offered to buy Google Chrome in a deal for tens of billions of dollars after it was valued at around $18 billion last month but gave a $34.5 billion unsolicited offer. File Photo (2018) by Sascha Steinbach/EPA
Aug. 12 (UPI) -- AI startup Perplexity has offered to buy Google Chrome in a deal for tens of billions of dollars.
The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence software company in July was valued at about $18 billion. The company made a $34.5 billion unsolicited offer to buyout Google's Chrome browser, The Wall Street Journal first reported.
In addition, Perplexity said it would commit to keeping Google's open-source Chromium project.
The Google Chrome browser, which launched in 2008, has a reported valuation of anywhere between $20 billion to $50 billion.
Perplexity said multiple investors have agreed to back the deal despite its current valuation as it battles for supremacy in the AI marketplace with bigger names such as OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, which approached the company this year about its own potential acquisition of Perplexity.
The AI-powered search engine Perplexity launched its AI-powered browser Comet last month.
The unsolicited offer comes after the U.S. Department of Justice had suggested Google divest itself of Chrome stemming from the antitrust lawsuit Google lost in 2024 that said it violated U.S. antitrust law as a monopoly in search and text advertising.
But Google officials have yet to reveal how the search engine giant plans to adjust.
Google did not immediately reply to UPI's request for comment.
