Perplexity and Nvidia Launch Portable Computer, a Fully Local AI Agent Platform That Eliminates Cloud Costs

Perplexity and Nvidia launch Portable Computer, a fully local AI agent platform running entirely on users' own hardware that eliminates cloud costs, targeting privacy-sensitive industries like law, healthcare, and finance — though it currently requires 24GB VRAM and is limited to Linux machines with RTX GPUs.

• Perplexity and Nvidia are launching Portable Computer today, a fully local AI agent platform that runs entirely on users' own hardware, starting with Nvidia's DGX Spark and Linux machines with RTX GPUs, eliminating cloud token costs by keeping all processing on-device.
• The platform bundles local AI models, an agent harness, inference engine, tools, and a security sandbox into a single app, outperforming open-source alternatives like Pi and Hermes on internal benchmarks, while also supporting hybrid escalation to cloud frontier models for harder tasks with user permission.
• The launch deepens the Nvidia-Perplexity partnership and targets privacy-sensitive industries like law, healthcare, and finance, though the product currently requires 24GB VRAM, is limited to Linux with Windows support coming in September, and notably excludes Apple silicon hardware.