Artificial Intelligence firm signed a $750 million agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service according to Bloomberg. This deal will allow Perplexity to run a range of AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry program, including systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.
“We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic,” a Perplexity spokesperson said. The spokesperson also added that the company hasn’t shifted its spending from Amazon Web Services, long the startup’s main cloud provider, as part of the Microsoft deal.
“AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks,” he said.
Perplexity is one of the most highly valued AI startups, however it faces strong competition from Google and OpenAI. It has also been unable to raise as much capital as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have recently engaged in a wave of infrastructure deals.
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Big companies typically rent cloud services from multiple partners, both to get access to unique services and to limit their reliance on any single vendor. That phenomenon has accelerated during the AI age, as businesses experiment with new tools and sign deals with model builders and the cloud providers whose servers run that software.
Perplexity built much of its business on AWS, using Amazon’s Bedrock service to access Anthropic models for Perplexity’s search engine. However, Perplexity and AWS have been engaged in a legal fight in recent months.
Amazon had sued Perplexity over the startup’s “agentic” shopping feature, which uses automation to place orders for users, alleging it covertly accessed Amazon customer accounts and disguised automated activity as human browsing.
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Perplexity responded by calling Amazon a bully and its actions “a threat to user choice.” Srinivas said in November that his company has made “hundreds of millions” in commitments to AWS.
The deal with Perplexity will help Microsoft in positioning Azure as the place to build AI applications and deploy models from a variety of vendors. Microsoft has long offered models from its partner OpenAI and in November struck a deal with Anthropic to do the same.
“Our customers expect to use multiple models as part of any workload,” CEO Satya Nadella said during an earnings call earlier this week. “And we offer the broadest selection of models of any hyperscaler.”
Over 1,500 Microsoft Foundry customers have already used both OpenAI and Anthropic models, according to Nadella, who added that the number of customers spending over $1 million per quarter on Foundry grew nearly 80% in the quarter which ended in December.