Crusoe signs multiyear cloud deal with Perplexity for AI models

Crusoe, the data center and AI cloud infrastructure company, has locked in a multiyear cloud capacity agreement with Perplexity AI to support the search startup’s model training and inference workloads. The deal puts Crusoe in charge of hosting and managing Nvidia AI chips on Perplexity’s behalf, a managed GPU arrangement that gives the AI search company another option beyond the hyperscaler giants it already relies on. For Crusoe, the partnership is another headline-grabbing contract in what’s been a breakout stretch. Earlier in September, the company announced an approximately $13 billion five-year AI cloud contract with Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm. What the deal actually covers Under the agreement, Crusoe will host Nvidia chips dedicated to Perplexity’s AI operations and manage those chips over their full lifetime. Crusoe SVP Erwan Menard confirmed the company’s role in overseeing the hardware on an ongoing basis, which means Perplexity is essentially outsourcing not just the compute but the operational headaches that come with running large GPU clusters. The deal also includes a reciprocal element: Perplexity will make its Enterprise Max product available to more...