Perplexity has signed a $750 million deal with Microsoft Azure. With this deal, the AI startup is expanding its business beyond its long-time cloud partner, Amazon. The three-year commitment will allow Perplexity to deploy AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry service, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, a report claimed, citing people familiar with the deal, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. However, a Perplexity spokesperson has confirmed that as part of the Microsoft deal, the company hasn’t shifted spending from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has long been the startup’s primary cloud provider.In a statement to Bloomberg, a Perplexity spokesperson said, “We are excited to partner with Microsoft for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic. AWS remains Perplexity’s preferred cloud infrastructure provider, and we’re excited to announce expansions of that partnership in the coming weeks.”This deal comes after Perplexity and Amazon got engaged in a legal fight last year. In November 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity to prevent the startup from allowing consumers to use its AI tools to shop on Amazon’s online marketplace. Perplexity responded by calling Amazon a bully and its actions “a threat to user choice”. Meanwhile, that same month, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said his company had received “hundreds of millions” in commitments from AWS.Perplexity built much of its business on AWS, using Amazon’s Bedrock service to access Anthropic models for Perplexity’s search engine. Srinivas is also a repeat speaker at AWS conferences. In a 2023 appearance, he said that he had decided to go “all-in” on Amazon’s cloud. AWS, in turn, has cited Perplexity as a cutting-edge AI customer using its services.
How will this Perplexity deal help Microsoft
For Microsoft, the Perplexity deal strengthens its efforts to position Azure as the platform for building AI applications and deploying models from a variety of vendors. Microsoft has long offered models from its partner OpenAI. In November 2025, the company also struck a deal with Anthropic to do the same.Earlier this week, during an earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “Our customers expect to use multiple models as part of any workload. And we offer the broadest selection of models of any hyperscaler.”Over 1,500 Microsoft Foundry customers have already used both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Nadella said. The number of customers spending over $1 million per quarter on Foundry grew nearly 80% in the quarter which ended in December 2025, he added.Perplexity is a high-value AI startup but faces tough competition from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI in its goal of changing how people search for information online. It also hasn’t raised nearly as much money as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have recently made a series of infrastructure deals.Large companies typically rent cloud services from multiple providers, both to access unique capabilities and to avoid overreliance on any single vendor. This has increased during the AI era, as businesses test new tools and sign deals with model makers and cloud providers whose servers run that software.