CoreWeave (CRWV) saw its shares rise nearly 6% in pre-market trading on Wednesday after announcing a multi-year agreement to support the inference operations of Perplexity, a startup AI-driven search engine backed by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia.
As part of this agreement, CoreWeave will become Perplexity AI’s primary backend cloud partner. The company runs next-generation inference tasks on dedicated NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 clusters operated by cloud providers.
As the companies note, this platform will serve as the foundation upon which Perplexity’s Sonar and Search API products will expand.
“AI applications running in production require more than just access to raw infrastructure; they require best-in-class performance and reliability, as well as a cloud platform designed end-to-end for AI to simplify computing operations,” said Max Hjelm, senior vice president of revenue at CoreWeave.
AI inference is the real-time execution phase of an AI model that uses the trained model to make predictions or generate output based on new input data. This process ranges from answering questions, making recommendations, and classifying data to powering real-time features such as search results, image recognition, and language translation.
In Perplexity’s product ecosystem, inference speed, latency stability, and scalability directly impact user experience.
“We are proud to partner with Perplexity to scale inference workloads on CoreWeave’s AI cloud,” he said.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, emphasized that the provider’s technical capabilities and collaborative approach were key factors in the decision.
“We are impressed by CoreWeave’s combination of technical aptitude and partner-first mindset to help AI-native companies accelerate their growth and expansion goals,” said Shevelenko, recognizing CoreWeave’s role in enabling Perplexity to improve infrastructure efficiency and model quality and deliver powerful AI search and automation services across sectors.
Search companies have already started deploying workloads using the cloud provider’s Kubernetes service. We also use W&B models for training and fine-tuning as part of a broader multi-cloud strategy.
Professional GPU cloud operators are becoming increasingly important partners for AI companies facing increasing computational demands. CoreWeave has achieved excellent results in the MLPerf benchmark and holds a Platinum ranking in the SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX evaluation for performance and reliability.
The deal will allow the cloud company to adopt Perplexity Enterprise Max internally, giving employees access to web search, research tools, and advanced AI models through a single interface.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. Please see our Editorial Policy for more information on how we create and review content.
