By BigGo Finance
Publication Date: 2026-08-26 09:55:00
Perplexity is pushing its AI agent platform beyond the cloud, unveiling a new version of its Computer product that runs entirely on local hardware. Dubbed Portable Computer, the release marks a significant shift for the AI company as it looks to address growing concerns around inference costs, data privacy, and the limitations of cloud-dependent agentic systems.
The announcement, made on August 25, positions Portable Computer as a fully local alternative to the cloud-based Computer platform the company launched in February. That earlier product relied on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 as its core reasoning engine, routing tasks to specialized subagents across 19 different AI models. Portable Computer flips that architecture on its head: the orchestrator LLM, subagent LLM, and the entire agent harness now operate on the user’s own hardware, with no cloud dependency by default.
For now, the hardware requirements are steep. Perplexity is launching Portable Computer on Nvidia’s DGX Spark workstation, a desktop AI machine equipped with the GB10 superchip and 128GB of unified memory. The company is also supporting Linux systems with Nvidia RTX GPUs, with Windows compatibility slated for September. On the Windows side, users will need an RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM, a threshold that excludes many consumer desktops.
The initial model lineup includes Qwen 3.8 27B, an open-source model from Alibaba, and PPLX 27B, a post-trained version of the same model that Perplexity has…