AS we know a US Court ruled in 2024 that it finds an unlawful monopoly in Google’s online search. The justice department has sought a divestiture of Chrome as a part of the remedies suggested.
Perplexity AI has made on $34.5 billion unsolicited all-cash offer for Alphabet’s Chrome browser. Though it is a low-bid, it is also a bold bid that requires financing well above Perplexity’s own valuation.
Buying Chrome gives Perplexity access to more than 3 billion users of Chrome to give it an edge in the AI search race. Google has not offered Chrome for sale and plans to appeal a US Court ruling.
Perplexity did not disclose how it plans to fund the offer. It is three-year old company. It has raised a funding of $1billion from investors such as Nvidia and SoftBank. It was last valued at $14 billion.
Web browsers are gaining prominence as the new generation users turn to bots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity for answers. Perplexity already has a browser called Comet. Acquining Chrome can make it more competitive.
Perplexity’s bid pledges to keep the underlying browser code called Chromium open source. It expects to invest a few billions more. It does not want to change Chrome’s default search engine.
Chrome is essential for Google to its own AI-push that rolls out features such as AI-generation search summaries called Overviews to help defend its search market share.
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