Perplexity Inks $750 Mn Microsoft Azure Deal as Cloud Rivalry With Amazon Intensifies
By Pallavi Chakravorty ·
AI startup Perplexity has signed a $750 million agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud services, Bloomberg News reported. The three-year deal will enable the NVIDIA-backed company to run a range of artificial intelligence models through the Microsoft Foundry programme, including systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.
“Perplexity has chosen Microsoft Foundry as its primary AI platform for model sourcing under a new multi-year agreement,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
The deal highlights Microsoft’s aggressive push to establish Azure as a leading destination for AI application development. By hosting models from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI under one umbrella, the software giant is positioning itself as a critical hub for fast-growing AI startups seeking flexibility and scale.
Perplexity’s expansion into Microsoft’s ecosystem comes as the company remains embroiled in a federal legal dispute with its primary cloud provider, Amazon. In November, Amazon filed a lawsuit seeking to block Perplexity from using AI agents to enable automated shopping on its marketplace.
Despite the legal friction, Perplexity insists its relationship with Amazon Web Services remains intact. “AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks,” a company spokesperson told Bloomberg.
The Microsoft partnership follows the launch of Perplexity’s ‘Comet’ shopping agent, a tool that has drawn Amazon’s ire. Amazon alleges the agent violates its terms of service by impersonating human users to complete transactions, a claim Perplexity disputes.
“We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic,” a Perplexity spokesperson said, adding that the deal provides crucial redundancy as the startup competes with established players such as Google.
The spokesperson stressed that Perplexity has not shifted spending away from AWS as part of the Microsoft agreement.
Valued at approximately $20 billion as of September 2025, Perplexity is under pressure to rapidly scale its infrastructure. While the startup has raised substantial funding, it continues to trail rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic in vast financial firepower.