Perplexity AI on Tuesday said it has submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion all-cash offer to acquire Google’s Chrome browser amid ongoing federal antitrust litigation against Google parent Alphabet Inc. that could force it to divest the popular browser.
Though Perplexity’s surprise bid significantly exceeds its own valuation of $18 billion and was characterized in a Wall Street Journal report as a “longshot,” the company says it has lined up several investors including large venture-capital funds who “agreed to back the transaction in full,” according to a report in the Journal.
The newspaper said Perplexity’s offer was “designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy in highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable, independent operator,” in Perplexity’s words. But Alphabet, under CEO Sundar Pichai, has resisted proposals to sell off Chrome despite interest from a number of parties that include OpenAI and DuckDuckGo.
Alphabet has not offered Chrome for sale and plans to appeal a U.S. court ruling last year that found it held an unlawful monopoly in online search by signing multibillion-dollar deals to make its search engine the default on web browsers and smartphones, including devices from Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics. The Justice Department has sought a Chrome divestiture as part of the case’s remedies. The judge in the case is expected to rule on remedies as early as this month.
Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman bluntly said there is “0% chance Google spins Chrome to Perplexity.”
“The court should see Perplexity’s offer for what it is: a move to take advantage of the overzealous antitrust scrutiny of a competitor, not a market signal that there are suitable buyers for Chrome should Google be ordered to divest its browser,” Alex Reinauer, research fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in an email.
Still, interest in Chrome is illustrative of the re-emergence of web browsers as vital conduits to search traffic and glean user data as a new generation of AI users turn to ChatGPT and Perplexity for answers.
Perplexity boasts a new artificial intelligence (AI) browser, called Comet, that injects more generative AI into the browser experience. Acquiring Chrome would give it the heft to better compete against bigger rivals such as OpenAI, the reasoning goes.
Perplexity — itself the subject of acquisition rumors tied to Apple and Meta Platforms Inc. — is no stranger to bold, headline-generating offers. In January, it made a similar bid for TikTok U.S., offering to merge with the popular short-video app to resolve U.S. concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
“Perplexity’s offer comes at the end of a chain of multiple, headline-grabbing ‘offers’ from merging with TikTok to investments in Google’s Chrome. At the end of the day, Perplexity benefits greatly from two areas: becoming the browser default for its flagship product and investing in the Chromium open-source browser engine that powers Chrome and other major browsers, said Neal Riley, co-founder of Salable.
