Perplexity Signs $750 Million AI Cloud Partnership with Microsoft

AI startup Perplexity made a $750 million deal with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service.

Perplexity AI has signed a $750 million deal with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service, expanding its business. According to the Perplexity and Microsoft deal, Perplexity will be able to deploy AI models created by OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI through Microsoft's Foundry service over the next three years.

A Perplexity spokesperson expressed excitement about the partnership with Microsoft, which will provide access to frontier models from X, OpenAI, and Anthropic. At the same time, the spokesperson emphasized that the Microsoft relationship will not diminish Perplexity's spending on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has historically been the startup's major cloud provider. He also stated that AWS is Perplexity's primary cloud infrastructure provider, and they are excited to announce further extensions of that partnership in future weeks.

Amazon.com Inc. was a longtime cloud partner for Perplexity. Initially, Perplexity relied on Amazon's Bedrock to use Anthropic models for its AI search engine and established a large portion of its AI company on AWS.

However, recently the relationship has become tensed when Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in November to prevent its AI technologies from enabling online purchases on the Amazon shopping platform. Perplexity accused Amazon of bullying and described the case as a danger to user choice. And the CEO of Perplexity Aravind Srinivas revealed that the corporation has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to AWS.

For Microsoft, the Perplexity agreement strengthens Microsoft's aim of positioning Azure as the top platform for developing AI applications and deploying models from diverse vendors. While Microsoft has previously provided models through its partner OpenAI, it broadened its ecosystem in November 2025 by reaching an agreement with Anthropic.

Over 1,500 Microsoft Foundry clients have already utilized both OpenAI and Anthropic models, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Moreover, he claimed the number of clients spending over $1 million every quarter on Foundry climbed roughly 80% in the quarter that ended in December 2025.