Perplexity wants to buy Google Chrome for $ 34.5 billion: report

The company Ai Perplexity has offered to buy the Google Chrome browser for $ 34.5 billion, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The offer is characterized as a “longhot”, especially since the perplexity itself is only evaluated approximately $ 18 billion, according to the newspaper, but the idea is rooted in a very real problem for Google: a judge is currently examining if the Google parent alphabet should be forced to sell Chrome compared to antitrust concerns.

Perplexity told the newspaper that he had aligned investors, including major venture capital funds. The newspaper reports that Perplexity’s offer was “designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy in the highest public interest by placing Chrome with an independent operator capable”, in the words of the IA company. But Alphabet, under the CEO Sundar Pichai, resisted the proposals to sell Chrome.

Other companies such as Openai previously floated the interest in the purchase of Chrome, although none of the big players has taken a big public step like perplexity. Neither Google nor Perplexity answered Gizmodo questions sent by email on Tuesday morning.

Google Chrome has about 3.5 billion users, which is an incredible market share when you remember that there are only 8.1 billion people on the planet. The United States Ministry of Justice continued Google for the first time in 2020 for allegations of monopolistic behavior, and the US district judge Amit Mehta judged in the summer of 2024 that the technology giant was really a monopoly. “Google is a monopoly, and he acted as one to maintain his monopoly,” wrote Mehta at the time. The question is what you are doing about it.

Perplexity recently launched its own browser called Comet, which injects more generative artificial intelligence into the browser experience. But there is a disagreement among AI lovers as to whether browsers are in fact the future of AI experience. Many futurists imagine that the traditional web browser will not even be one thing in a decade. And AI skeptics are quick to emphasize how reliable AI can be when asking difficult questions.

The proceedings against Google have accelerated in recent years during its alleged antitrust behavior, both in Europe and in the United States in 2023, the DOJ said that Google had embarked on “anti-competitive and exclusive driving”, and President Joe Biden, the Attorney General, Merrick B. Garland, said that the prosecutions against Google aimed to protect consumers.

Judge Metha is expected to govern this month on the remedy against Google’s monopoly. And although it is not clear what the judge will decide, he will undoubtedly take an opinion of the offer of perplexity.