By Trending Desk
Publication Date: 2026-01-05 06:44:00
At a time when big tech companies Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity are pouring billions and billions of dollars into data centres, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has predicted that the future of AI does not lie in massive cloud data centers but on devices. Aravind Srinivas believes that the future of artificial intelligence would come from locally run on-device AI models. What he meant was that the future of AI may not be in the cloud data centre, which means that the massive, energy-hungry data centres for which tech giants pouring billions of dollars may become irrelevant. The Perplexity CEO said power would sit in users’ pockets, driven by on-device silicon capable of running advanced large language models.
In a podcast with Prakhar Gupta on YouTube, Srinivas said that the “biggest threat to a data center is if the intelligence can be packed locally on a chip that’s running on the device and then there’s no need to inference all of it on like one centralized data center.”
The Perplexity CEO added that the benefits of on-device AI models is that it will easily adapt to user preferences since the AI model will be “living on your computer.” Srinivas argued that the rise of high-performance, on-device AI poses the biggest existential threat to the centralised infrastructure that currently dominates the tech industry.
