By AJ Dellinger
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 18:15:00
Perplexity, a largely forgotten player in the AI space save for its role as Joe Rogan’s personal fact checker, is looking to regain some relevance by asking people to think global, process local. The company announced Tuesday that it is launching Portable Computer, a version of its agentic “Computer” platform that runs entirely locally on your own hardware.
Computer was launched by Perplexity back in February to offer users an always-on AI agent that can run autonomously to complete tasks whether you’re at the keyboard or not. Computer took the OpenClaw approach, where the agentic platform runs on a dedicated device like a Mac Mini, but the actual AI processing is still cloud-based. Portable Computer walls off the garden completely, bringing the model on device—meaning it’s running entirely on a user’s hardware.
That requires more processing power, which is why Perplexity’s initial release of Portable Computer is limited to Nvidia’s DGX Spark desktop supercomputer and Linux machines with Nvidia RTX GPUs. Part of the appeal of the Mac Mini for AI agents like OpenClaw was the bang for your buck on processing power—a Mac Mini with an M4 chip sets you back about $900. You’re going to need to fork over about 5x that price for a DGX Spark.
The benefit is that’s a one-time fee. You won’t have to keep tabs on your tokenmaxxing because there’s a credits bill coming at the end of the month, since everything is done locally (except when…