Perplexity offers $34.5 billion for Google Chrome

Background

A browser is more than a window onto the web: the search engine it uses by default decides which company receives the traffic when someone types a query into the address bar. Chrome is the browser built by Google, and Chromium is the open-source codebase underneath it, which other browsers also build on. Any change of ownership therefore touches both competition in search and the shared code the wider web depends on.

Perplexity is an AI startup. It had just launched its own browser, Comet, in July 2025 — about a month before it made the bid described here ^[1][3]. As of June 2025 the company was valued at $14 billion, well below the size of the offer it would go on to make ^[1].

The bid

On 12 August 2025 Perplexity made a $34.5 billion bid to buy the Chrome browser from Google ^[1]. The offer was all-cash ^[2].

The company framed the purchase as a way out of Google's legal troubles rather than simply as an acquisition: Perplexity said the sale could remedy the antitrust litigation against Google ^[1]. In that framing, spinning Chrome off would address the competition concerns at issue, and Perplexity would be the buyer that made the separation possible.

What came with the price

Perplexity attached several commitments to the offer. It said it would keep the underlying Chromium browser code open source ^[2], so that the shared foundation other browsers build on would not be closed off. It pledged to invest $3 billion over two years ^[2]. And it said it would make no changes to Chrome's default search engine ^[2] — the setting that determines which search service Chrome queries, and the part of the browser with the most direct commercial consequences.

Why it drew attention

The bid was striking for the mismatch between buyer and target. Perplexity was a startup valued at $14 billion ^[1], and the price it named was far above that valuation. It was also bidding for a browser owned by a far larger company, and doing so while building a browser of its own: Comet had arrived only about a month earlier ^[3].

Taken together, the elements of the offer sketch out a particular argument. The all-cash structure and the stated investment pledge were meant to show the bid was serious and funded ^[2]. The promise to leave the default search engine alone was meant to answer the obvious objection that a buyer with its own search ambitions would simply redirect Chrome's traffic to itself ^[2]. The promise to keep Chromium open source was aimed at developers and at anyone worried about the shared infrastructure of the web ^[2]. And the antitrust framing turned the bid into a proposal about how the case against Google could end, not only about who should own a browser ^[1].

The bid put a concrete number on how much an AI company thought control of a major browser was worth, and it made the ownership of Chrome part of the public argument over AI and search competition.