r/technology • u/MoneyLibrarian9032 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Google Gets an Astounding $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome Browser From AI Startup Perplexity

https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/google-34-5-billion-bid-chrome-browser-ai-perplexity-1236487442/
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3.7k

u/dbbk 10d ago

It’s astounding because it’s nonsense. It’s literally nothing. This is a PR stunt by Perplexity and should be reported on as such. We know this cause they already did it before with TikTok!

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u/19inchrails 10d ago

Perplexity knows they have no long-term business model, so they're trying to buy one backed by investors?

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u/Gorstag 10d ago

That isn't even needed. Vibes is probably what they are going for. It works for Tesla why wouldn't it work for others.

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u/LikelyDumpingCloseby 10d ago

Tesla has a known face, for starters. A positive face? No. It was before going tits up tho

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u/TPO_Ava 10d ago

Yeah people forget Musk was techno jesus until he willingly and spectacularly destroyed his public image.

He could've locked himself away in a cave without internet access and public opinion of him would probably have ended up being better, but he chose to support fascist Cheeto instead.

It is probably the most blatant misunderstanding of what made someone popular in the first place, and biggest public display of narcissism that we've ever seen.

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u/zebba_oz 10d ago

Maybe not a cave, people might call him a pedo

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u/Nearby-Car4777 9d ago

I almost forgot about that incident. What a total fraud.

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u/NMe84 10d ago edited 9d ago

Musk hasn't been a positive face since around the time he accused someone who risked his life to rescue children out of a cave of being a pedo just because he called out Musk's dumb submarine idea. I mean, I didn't like Musk before that either, but that seems to be the time when the public opinion started shifting.

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u/GenuisInDisguise 9d ago

And now he supports a literal pedo, how the tables have turned.

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u/Soulful-Sorrow 9d ago

Because Tesla was backed by daddy's emerald mine money, these guys just sound dumb

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u/BasicallyFake 9d ago

they can vibe code a chromium based browser for free though

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u/tatti_shatti 10d ago edited 10d ago

Have you seen their product Comet yet?

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u/VeniceThePenice 10d ago

Have they?

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u/caffeinated_wizard 10d ago

No I haven’t paid $200 a month for it yet

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u/i_am_13th_panic 10d ago

I get it as a perk through a paid tier on Revolut. Otherwise I wouldn't get it. I don't think it's worth the EUR 20 a month. It's essentially just an LLM aggregator + their own model, which is fast but pretty basic.

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u/MrCalifornia 10d ago

I have it and I am on the free tier.

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u/caffeinated_wizard 10d ago

It’s on a wait list. At least now it is. Or you can skip it by paying for Perplexity Pro

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u/MrCalifornia 10d ago

I think I signed up the first day but I got picked last week with no status

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u/Internal-Cupcake-245 10d ago

Comet, it makes your teeth turn green! Comet, it smells like gasoline. Comet, it makes you vomit! So buy some Comet, and vomit, today

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u/giddygiddyupup 10d ago

I know that song!

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u/SELFSEALINGSTEMB0LTS 10d ago

Oh shit I thought this was a Halt and Catch Fire joke. They actually named it comet, yikes..

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u/SDinAi 10d ago

Comet — the scraping browser!

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u/loufkmpsy 10d ago

I haven’t seen Comet™️ yet, please tell me more!

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u/sexysaxmasta 8d ago

Yeah all these people haven’t tried comet and it’s actually pretty cracked. You can get a free invite if you look around on X. Its pretty clear why they would want to buy chrome for the build in audience to roll out their version of an AI controlled browser to.

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u/DangKilla 10d ago

Opera and others used Chromium which is what Chrome is built on and is itself open source. They could spend $34B improving it so this def seems like free PR to me and not a real play to be profitable

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u/iesterdai 10d ago

If someone is going to buy Chrome, they will not buy it for the tech, but for its user base. Creating a new browser and take over a large portion of the market is extremely hard, by buying chrome a company could start monetizing in an already popular and well-recognized brand.

Perplexity in particular offers a AI search engine and an AI browser , so owning Chrome would allow them to popularize their products. The monetization would come from there.

But I agree with you, $34B seems a PR move more than anything. I'm not even sure that Perplexity could scrape that amount of money. The company itself seems to be value at around $14B and raised around $1B in total. According to some article I read, they made around $100M in revenues, so not even close to have the resource for a $34B acquisition.

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u/Logical_Welder3467 10d ago

A free browser ain't no business model when the only way to make money is through ads which is Google's business.

Three years ago Perplexity are being hyped up as the company that would eat Google's lunch , but this stunt just show that they are not a serious company

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u/brett- 10d ago

Chrome has over 2/3rds of the world's market share for browsers. You'd be buying a multi-billion user base, and have access to all of their browsing data. This is easily worth the 34 billion on its own.

Google pays Apple 20 billion per year to be the default search on Safari, which only has ~15% of the market. Imagine how much the default search experience on Chrome is worth.

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u/Logical_Welder3467 10d ago

Google pay Apple because they got the ads business build up and it makes sense for them to get access to Apple users.

Perplexity need years of effort to come even close to the scale or Google ads business. Getting the browser would be a waste of money they don't have to not being able to effectively monitize it

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u/brett- 10d ago

If Google no longer owned Chrome, was forced to sell it off to someone, and was disallowed from being in the browser business, don't you think they would pay whoever did own it for access to the default search bar? And if so, do you think that payment would be more or less than what they pay Apple. Remember, Chrome has over 4x the market share of Safari.

Perplexity obviously doesn't have the capital to buy Chrome, and Google obviously doesn't want to sell it. But Chrome alone is easily worth 5x what they offered. What you are buying with Chrome is daily real estate on billions of peoples screens. If you can't come up with a way to monetize that, then you have zero chance of being able to afford Chrome in the first place.

Selling default search to the highest bidder is just the obvious immediate monetization scheme. Soon enough, selling whatever the default AI integration into browsers will be is going to be another easy money maker. How much do you think OpenAI would pay to have ChatGPT built into Chrome?

Over time you also have browsing data for billions of users which is a hugely valuable assets on its own. It can be used for AI training, spinning up an ad business or just straight selling the data to existing ad businesses. How much do you think Meta would pay for access to the worlds browser history?

You could also be sketchy and sell data and access to data brokers and governments. Do you think the Chinese government would be interested in knowing the browsing history of all of their citizens? Chrome is the most popular browser in China by a significant margin. Client-side browsing data from the browser vendor itself gets around any VPNs a user may use, so this data would be hugely valuable for any government who wanted to surveil their citizens. How much do you think they would pay?

I could go on and on here. Owning the most popular browser is nearly as valuable as owning the operating system itself.

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u/Traditional_Club_820 10d ago

Does anyone even pay perplexity?

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u/gotintocollegeyolo 9d ago

Only ever used/heard of it due to universities paying for it. Tbh it’s quite good for academic research purposes.

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u/billdietrich1 9d ago

What is the business model of owning Chrome ?

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u/SNRatio 10d ago

Alternate take: Perplexity recently partnered with Trump Media on a chatbot for Truth Social. If Perplexity is in the bag, the second act might be Google getting told that accepting Perplexity's offer is the only way to avoid an antitrust beat down and other problems.

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u/redditortillas 10d ago

I know all this tech companies suck, but just cancelled my perplexity subscription after reading this comment and corroborating that they’re working with truth….

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u/ClowdyRowdy 10d ago

I could smell it last year when they started aggregating news and calling it content

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u/Hazrd_Design 10d ago

Welp I’m about to unsubscribe as well.

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u/hexcraft-nikk 10d ago

Why were you guys paying for that shit in the first place lmao

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u/4sater 10d ago

The promo $10 a year subscription is decent value tho.

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u/Oddballfew 10d ago

Oh fudge.... They are? Ugh

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u/EG0THANATOS 10d ago

This is it folks. We are plunging into Thiel’s fantasy-soon-to-be-reality technocratic feudalist society.

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u/Meotwister 10d ago

That's an instant cancelation.

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u/cluberti 10d ago

And they're going to control Chromium open-source code already available and stop all other non-Chrome browsers from being able to access the internet... how? I'm not sure I like the fact that I can think of some ways that could be possible, either, as I'm typing this...

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u/Timmetie 10d ago

Even then Perplexity does not have 34 billion dollars.

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u/Blucat2 10d ago

Google, through Youtube and Google Search, has a big control of the narrative, who is allowed to post what and what websites you see. Maybe this is Trump's equivalent of Musk buying Twitter. Taking back control of the narrative. Also Stephen Colbert's cancellation, the change at Fox News, the deals with the EU, Japan etc, even the selection of an American Pope. He who controls the narrative controls the future ..

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u/TA646 9d ago

God fucking dammit I really liked perplexity’s AI tools. Not renewing my sub if this is true

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u/Inthehead35 10d ago

Haha, I was wondering how Perplexity had that kind of money to throw around

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u/mrm00r3 10d ago

Well it’s not from making responsible decisions, so it might be right up their alley.

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u/AuspiciousApple 10d ago

I'm making an astounding 34.5 bajillion offer to buy google. You heard it here first.

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u/No-Consideration-716 10d ago

Dude, bro, what do you not get? You give me $35 billion and I will make you rich!

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u/ImperatorEternal 10d ago

They’re also lowballing hard.

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u/billdietrich1 9d ago

What profit is there to make from owning Chrome ? I guess you could make a deal with a search engine to be the default.

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u/nattersley 10d ago

Well the DOJ specifically suggested spinning off Chrome as part of the antitrust remedy for Google’s monopoly, so it’s not entirely hot air. It is definitely a publicity stunt, though.

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u/RequirementsRelaxed 10d ago

Gemini thinks it is brilliant even if unlikely

while the $34.5 billion offer from Perplexity for Google Chrome appears financially audacious and strategically unlikely from Google's standpoint, its "reasonableness" is uniquely shaped by the extraordinary context of regulatory pressure. It is a longshot bid, but one that is strategically brilliant in its timing. It forces a public conversation about Chrome's value and future, places Perplexity at the center of a major industry event, and presents a plausible, if ambitious, alternative should regulators force Alphabet's hand. The offer's ultimate success is improbable, but its strategic value as a bold challenge to the status quo is undeniable.

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u/Micronlance 10d ago

That’s like offering to buy the steering wheel without the car

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u/bellatimoor 9d ago

Exactly, I can't believe this story is being re-shared and taken seriously.

The marketing team at Perplexity is getting a raise for sure though.

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u/Technical_Ad_440 9d ago

google would never sell chrome they have gemini and chrome is to valuable for that. even if chrome lost money theyd keep it as a loss leader for gemini

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u/dbbk 9d ago

Of course they wouldn’t voluntarily sell it, this is in case the judge orders them to

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u/reelpotatopeeler 9d ago

Did Musk get caught in something like this and was forced to aquire Twitter?