By @Hernan Quijano
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 23:31:00
Nvidia and Perplexity have announced Portable Computer, based on Qwen midsize (27B and 35B)–parameter AI models designed to run locally on Nvidia hardware, including the DGX Spark, RTX Pro for workstation GPUs, and even GeForce RTX GPUs, either one with at least 24 GB of memory. Users need a Perplexity Pro (or Max) subscription to be able to download and run Portable Computer on a local workstation.
Nvidia and Perplexity bring Qwen midsize models to your local AI workstation. (Source: JPR)
Nvidia and Perplexity are partnering in the launch of Portable Computer, a Perplexity feature to run models on local AI workstations. At release, Qwen 3.8 27B or Qwen 3.6 35B are supported (for the rest of the article, we will refer to them as Qwen midsize models, for better readability). The Perplexity team worked to also have a post-trained version available at launch, which is called Qwen 3.8 PPLX 27B. Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is coming soon. Perplexity creates post-trained versions of both Qwen models specifically for its Portable Computer in order to increase accuracy compared to the stock models. JPR analyst Hernán Quijano attended a briefing Nvidia held with Perplexity ahead of the announcement, while the companies revealed the model on August 25. The model used for the demo was Qwen 3.8 27B DFlash2 (GB10), as shown on Figure 1 later in this article.
The headline number behind the model is not its parameter count on its own, but why that number was…
