Overview

• Perplexity formally offered $34.5 billion to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a letter that described the bid as serving the public interest.
• The company says investors have committed the necessary funds to back the offer, which nearly doubles Perplexity’s own valuation at about $18 billion.
• Terms include placing Chrome “in the hands of an independent operator,” advancing open-source development of Chromium, retaining Google as default search engine, and enabling users to choose an alternative.
• The bid leverages a U.S. antitrust case in which Judge Amit Mehta and the Justice Department are poised to decide whether to force a divestiture of Chrome to remedy Google’s monopoly ruling.
• Google has not put Chrome up for sale and plans to appeal the antitrust decision, making any acquisition contingent on a federal judge’s remedies ruling later this month.