AI startup Perplexity says it’s ready to pay a whopping $34.5 billion US ($47.5 billion CAD) to buy Google’s Chrome browser, according to the Wall Street Journal. The offer is nearly double Perplexity’s own $18 billion US valuation, with the company claiming several big investors have agreed to fully fund the deal.
The timing is key. A U.S. judge is deciding whether Google should be forced to sell Chrome to break up its dominance in online search. Last year, Judge Amit Mehta ruled Google illegally monopolized the search market, and a decision on possible remedies could come this month.
By making a public bid, Perplexity may be showing the court that a serious buyer exists if a sale is ordered. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the startup argued that its purchase would “serve the public interest” by putting Chrome under an independent operator.
Google hasn’t shown interest in selling though. Chrome has more than 3.5 billion users and over 60% of the browser market, is a core part of Google’s business. Pichai has warned that losing it could harm innovation, reduce security, and threaten Google’s future projects.
San Francisco-based Perplexity recently launched its own browser, Comet, to select users. It says it would keep Chromium—the open-source foundation for Chrome—running and still set Google as the default search engine, though users could change it.
Back in June, it was rumoured Apple was considering a bid for Perplexity, which offers an AI search engine that uses all major AI large language models.
Earlier this year, OpenAI, founders of ChatGPT, said they would want a piece of Chrome if Google was forced to sell.
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Google will NEVER sell off Chrome especially now given MV3 is killing Chrome extensions like uBlock and limiting others. Google even removed the Chrome feature to automatically delete cookies upon closing the browser. So no. It'll never happen unless the Supreme Court of USA orders it.
MV3 has made me move to firefox, which still allows uBlock. Now i use Chrome in a limited capacity. So, Chrome can do whatever it wants.
Problem is all the little users that don’t care. Nothing will beat Chrome until it’s out of Google’s hands, or perhaps if OpenAI creates a browser of its own, or Apple makes Safari PC/Linux compatible.