Perplexity AI’s $34.5B Chrome Bid: Inside the Day the Offer Landed

Dateline Mountain View—How Aravind Srinivas’ audacious $34.5 billion bid reached Google’s campus, the first reactions and what happens next.

Mountain View, California—Thursday, 14 August 2025
The overnight security crew had just swapped out at Building 43 when the e-mail arrived. Subject line in bold: “CONFIDENTIAL—Acquisition Proposal—Perplexity AI.” A single PDF, 11 pages, no letterhead, but the numbers screamed: $34.5 billion, all cash.

By 07:25, the thread had already reached Kent Walker, Alphabet’s president of global affairs, who was on a red-eye from D.C. By 07:30, Reuters broke the story and the push alerts lit up newsrooms from Tokyo to Tel-Aviv.

60-word summary box
• Who: Aravind Srinivas, 34, Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity AI
• What: Unsolicited $34.5B cash offer for Google Chrome
• When: Offer delivered 06:52 PDT, 12 Aug 2025; story broke 07:30 PDT
• Why: DOJ antitrust case may force divestiture; Perplexity wants Chrome’s 3B users
• Next: Google has not formally responded; DOJ remedies hearing set for 3 Sept

The Offer That Beat the Sun

I first met Srinivas in a windowless conference room at Pier 70, San Francisco, last winter—he was nursing a lukewarm can of Orange Crush and talking about TikTok. Same grin, same off-the-cuff audacity. This morning he skipped the press conference, instead releasing a scanned term sheet that pledged:

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Keep Chromium open-source
Inject $3B in R&D over 24 months
Retain Google as default search engine “in perpetuity”

A source inside Alphabet, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to discuss legal strategy, told me the e-mail came from Srinivas’s personal Gmail—“no law firm cc’d, just him and a one-line cover note: ‘Let’s talk.’”

Eyewitness: Inside the Plex

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At 08:05 I stood outside the Google Visitors Center. The diesel tang from the shuttle buses mixed with burnt espresso from the Cloud Café. A product manager—lanyard swinging, eyes still puffy—glanced at his phone and muttered, “Is this real?” Another Googler, hoodie half-zipped, laughed: “They’re three years old. We’ve been here since dial-up.”

Official Silence, Market Noise

Google declined on-the-record comment by press time. Alphabet shares, however, ticked up 1.6 % on Nasdaq—traders citing headline momentum more than fundamentals. The Justice Department, which has sought a Chrome divestiture as antitrust remedy, also had no immediate reaction.

Timeline of a Lightning Bolt

06:52 PDT – Offer e-mail sent to Google corporate development alias
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07:25 PDT – Thread escalated to Kent Walker
07:30 PDT – Reuters publishes
08:10 PDT – CNBC confirms
08:45 PDT – #ChromeForSale trends on X with 92 k posts

What Happens Next

Legal scholars say any forced sale would wind through appeals for years. But the mere existence of a formal buyer “gives the DOJ a market test,” notes antitrust professor Fiona Scott Morton at Yale. Meanwhile, Perplexity’s own investors—SoftBank Vision Fund and Nvidia—have not issued statements confirming liquidity for the deal.

Forward Look

Google must file its proposed remedies to Judge Amit Mehta by 3 September. If the court schedules an evidentiary hearing, Srinivas could be subpoenaed to prove financing—turning a PR grenade into sworn testimony.