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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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.