Bengaluru, February 1: AI search startup Perplexity has signed a USD 750 million cloud services agreement with Microsoft Azure, marking a major expansion beyond its long-time cloud partner Amazon Web Services. The three-year deal will allow Perplexity to deploy artificial intelligence models through Microsoft’s Foundry service, including offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, according to a report citing people familiar with the matter.

Despite the sizeable commitment, Perplexity has clarified that it is not moving spending away from AWS. A company spokesperson told Bloomberg that AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, adding that expansions of the Amazon partnership will be announced in the coming weeks. Comet Browser Update: Perplexity Rolls Out AI-Powered Browser on Android; Check Details.

The Microsoft deal comes after a tense period between Perplexity and Amazon. In November 2025, Amazon sued the startup over its AI-powered shopping features, a move Perplexity criticised as anti-competitive and harmful to user choice. Around the same time, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed that the company had secured “hundreds of millions” of dollars in commitments from AWS. Google vs Perplexity! Did Google Buy the Perplexity.in Domain and Redirect It to the Gemini AI Page?

Perplexity has historically built much of its technology stack on AWS, using Amazon Bedrock to access Anthropic models for its AI-powered search engine. Srinivas has repeatedly highlighted AWS as a key partner and previously said the company had gone “all-in” on Amazon’s cloud.

For Microsoft, the agreement strengthens Azure’s positioning as a multi-model AI platform. During a recent earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said customers increasingly expect access to multiple AI models within a single workload. He noted that more than 1,500 Microsoft Foundry customers have already used both OpenAI and Anthropic models, while high-spending Foundry customers grew nearly 80% in the quarter ending December 2025.

The deal highlights a broader industry trend, with large companies increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to access specialised AI capabilities and reduce reliance on a single vendor. As Perplexity competes with Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI in reshaping online search, diversified infrastructure partnerships are becoming a critical part of its growth strategy.

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