By Amanda Caswell
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 13:39:00
Most AI assistants require you to send your questions, files and other data to somebody else’s servers. Perplexity’s new Portable Computer turns that arrangement around by running the entire AI system on hardware you own.
Announced Tuesday, Portable Computer brings Perplexity’s agentic Computer platform to Nvidia DGX Spark and other Linux machines with compatible Nvidia graphics cards.
The company says every task begins on your machine. If the local model reaches a step that requires more advanced reasoning, Portable Computer asks for permission before sending that individual step to a frontier model in the cloud. The answer then returns to the local workflow, while files and other sensitive information can remain on the device.
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That could make it appealing to anyone who wants the convenience of an AI agent without automatically handing everything it touches to a cloud provider.
There is, however, a fairly expensive catch.
More than a locally installed chatbot
You can already download open models and run them on your own computer. The difficult part is turning one of those models into an AI agent that can work with files, use tools and complete a task involving several steps.
Doing that usually means finding and configuring an inference engine, agent harness, sandbox and any connectors needed to reach outside apps. You’re also responsible for getting…
