By Maria Deutscher
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 22:32:00
Perplexity AI Inc. today introduced Portable Computer, an artificial intelligence agent designed to run on desktops equipped with Nvidia Corp. silicon.
The launch follows a report that Nvidia is weighing an investment in the startup that could value it at over $30 billion. Furthermore, Nvidia has reportedly floated the idea of licensing Perplexity’s technology and hiring key employees.
Portable Computer is an on-device version of a cloud-based AI agent called Perplexity Computer that debuted in February. Both tools are designed to perform multi-step tasks such as developing web applications. When Perplexity Computer encounters a particularly time-consuming task, it split the work into smaller chunks and assigns each one to a different subagent.
Portable Computer brings similar capabilities to Nvidia’s DGX Spark device (pictured.) It’s a desktop computer that features a graphics card based on the company’s Blackwell architecture. Additionally, the system ships with a 20-core central processing unit and 128 gigabytes of memory.
On launch, Portable Memory uses the open-source Qwen 3.8 27B language model to automate tasks. It also supports a version of the algorithm called PPLX 27B that Perplexity optimized for the DGX Spark. The company added in a so-called multi-token prediction mechanism designed to speed up prompt processing.
Qwen 3.8 27B has a context window of 256,000 tokens. In practice, however, Perplexity determined that the model struggles to process…
