Artificial intelligence startup company Perplexity AI has made a bid on Google web browser Google Chrome for $34.5 billion, TheWrap has learned. The offer came after the U.S. Department of Justice advised Google to sell off its internet browser as part of the antitrust lawsuit it lost last year, which determined the company has a monopoly on internet search.
As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, several investors, including large venture capital funds, have stepped in to back Perplexity’s bid for Google Chrome, which has an estimated value of between $20 billion and $50 billion. Perplexity’s value is $16.5 billion shy of the money its offering to put up for Chrome.
Breaking down the formal terms of its official bid, Perplexity said it is committed to:
- Ongoing and substantial investment in Chromium, noting 3B over the next two years
- Never changing user defaults without giving users the choice
- Never stealthily replacing the default search engine of Chrome (Google)
- Making offers to a substantial portion of Chrome talent
- 100 months of availability and support for Chrome users
“For Perplexity, this is an important commitment to the open web, user choice and continuity for everyone who has chosen Chrome,” a spokesperson for Perplexity told TheWrap.
Perplexity’s bid is the latest in Google’s legal battle with the DOJ, which sued the tech giant in October 2020 over alleged antitrust violations, claiming it held a monopoly over fair competition in the search and advertising markets.
In November 2024, after finding that Google did in fact break antitrust laws in an effort to maintain a monopoly on web searches that same year, the DOJ pushed for a federal judge to dismantle Google to boost competition.
“The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”
The DOJ tasked Judge Amit Mehta, who sided with the department in August 2024, with prohibiting Google from making deals with Apple and Samsung. Google, the department claimed, pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default search engine on iPhones.
In April 2025, a U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google again violated antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly over online advertising technology that “substantially harmed” its customers and stifled competition.
The DOJ, over the course of a three-week trial, has “proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising,” the ruling read.
Judge Mehta, according to WSJ, may decide this month on how competition should be restored, which could involve forcing Google to sell Chrome — and that’s where Perplexity comes in. The WSJ report said that Perplexity wrote a letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai with an offer to buy Chrome, framing the plan as one “designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy in highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable, independent operator.”