Jan 29 (Reuters) – AI startup Perplexity has signed a $750 million agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The three-year deal will allow Nvidia-backed Perplexity to run a range of AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry program, including systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, the report said.
Perplexity and Microsoft did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
A Perplexity spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg that it was partnering with Microsoft “for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic”.
The spokesperson told Bloomberg Perplexity has not shifted spending from Amazon Web Services, the startup’s main cloud provider, as part of the Microsoft deal.
Amazon sued Perplexity last year over the startup’s “agentic” shopping feature, which uses automation to place orders for users, saying it covertly accessed Amazon customer accounts and disguised automated activity as human browsing.
(Reporting by Mihika Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)