Perplexity CEO: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta & How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China

Summary

• Micron more valuable than Meta within 6-12 months is Aravind’s headline call: Micron is already near $1T against Meta’s $1.3-1.4T, and “whatever is the bottleneck will command the price.” Memory has 5x’d in price and still isn’t fully priced because it’s still the bottleneck — same logic explains AMD’s run, since “agents are using CPUs more than humans” for the download-munge-host work around GPU-generated tokens.
• Consumer search is commoditized — “there’s no money there.” OpenAI is still the dominant leader in consumer search: Aravind says yes when Harry asks about dominance, and Harry specifies consumer search. Aravind then dismisses its monetization. That’s exactly why everyone (Codex, Claude Code, Perplexity Computer) is racing to agents that do work: “the frontier is where the money is.” He told Harry pre-show OpenAI isn’t ready for an IPO.
• The model is not the product; the single most important metric in AI is “token value per watt, per user.” Pure token resellers have no business and even model builders get commoditized; value sits in the harness-plus-orchestration layer. Perplexity’s edge: it orchestrates across models — “you wouldn’t find GPT-5-5 inside the Claude Code harness… you would find both these models inside Perplexity Computer.”
• Bearish on chat advertising — a direct challenge to the OpenAI ads thesis (“yet to be proven”). Google’s top advertisers are Amazon, Booking (~$16B/yr), Expedia; travel and fashion are subjective, exploratory decisions where “the interface is less about conversations and more about exploration,” and ads inside an answer engine “fundamentally corrupts the trust.” His split: objective transactions go agent-based, subjective ones stay ad-based.
• Power is and will remain the bottleneck: he estimates ~40 of 100 data centers aren’t being developed because of public resistance, and expects resistance to worsen as anti-AI sentiment channels through inequality, climate, grid prices, and RAM prices. Given unlimited money, the one thing he’d do is build data centers.
• Export controls: “jury’s still out” — short-term they’re the only reason a frontier/open-source gap exists (Anthropic lobbied hard for them), but they’re forging China into “a far more potent competitor” that’s vertically integrating around the Huawei stack. He puts 20-30% odds on another DeepSeek moment — a radically more efficient architecture that strands US capacity.
• Dario has done AI “a disservice” with jobs-doom messaging that’s also internally contradictory (“there is no evidence that AI is taking over jobs”): “You can’t win by saying that and also complaining about not being able to build data centers.” His counter-program: $1M compute credits to anyone with a credible path to a $1B company.
• Perplexity by the numbers: 400 people, ~$20B valuation, revenue “more than tripled” this year, ARR “far, far more” than $500M, burn down 50%+, IPO hopefully before 2028. The coming IPO wave could get partly funded by reallocation — he sketches Vanguard/BlackRock moving $30-40B out of Microsoft/Salesforce into Anthropic. His 10-year buy-and-hold among SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI: SpaceX, the only company building space infrastructure for connectivity.

Deep dive

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