Perplexity

AI Agents · On-Device/Edge AI · Nvidia Hardware

Launch

Perplexity launches Portable Computer, a local AI agent with Nvidia

Running the agent entirely on owned hardware could kill per-token billing for finance, legal, and coding workflows.

• Perplexity launched Portable Computer, an on-device version of its Computer agent platform built with Nvidia, running first on Nvidia's DGX Spark desktop supercomputer with RTX GPU PC support coming soon.
• Perplexity, best known for its AI search engine, debuted the cloud-based Computer agent in February; Portable Computer brings the same agent harness fully on-device.
• At launch it runs on Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 27B or PPLX 27B, Perplexity's own post-trained version, with Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B) coming soon to the model picker.
• The local orchestrator handles tasks on-device by default and only escalates to one of 15+ frontier cloud models for harder reasoning or live web access after the user explicitly authorizes it.
• Portable Computer requires serious hardware to start: an Nvidia Linux system with at least 24GB of VRAM, such as the roughly $4,000 DGX Spark, about five times the cost of an entry Mac Mini.
• Windows support is planned for September, and the app is expanding beyond DGX Spark to Nvidia RTX GPU-equipped PCs, widening the pool of machines that can run it.
• The launch lands amid reports that Nvidia is weighing an investment that could value Perplexity above $30 billion, alongside talk of licensing its technology.
• By shipping a locally run agent with zero per-task fees, Perplexity and Nvidia are betting that open-weight models have gotten good enough to pull serious agentic work off the cloud, tying AI adoption directly to hardware sales.