Perplexity Launches ‘Portable Computer’, a Local AI Agent Built With Nvidia

Bengaluru: Perplexity AI has launched a new product called Portable Computer, an AI agent that runs directly on a user’s own machine instead of the cloud. The tool was built together with Nvidia and works on Nvidia’s DGX Spark, a desktop-sized AI computer.

The launch comes right after news that Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation of more than $30 billion, up from about $20 billion just a year ago. The Information first reported the investment talks, adding that Nvidia has also considered a technology licensing deal with Perplexity. Neither company has confirmed the deal so far.

Portable Computer is a local version of Perplexity’s existing cloud-based agent tool, called Perplexity Computer, which launched in February. Both tools can handle multi-step tasks like building web apps, research, coding, and data analysis. When a task takes too long, the system breaks it into smaller parts and hands each part to a separate sub-agent.

The DGX Spark hardware runs on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GB10 platform, with a 20-core Arm CPU and 128GB of shared memory. At launch, Portable Computer uses the open-source Qwen 3.8 27B model, along with a version fine-tuned by Perplexity called PPLX 27B. Nvidia’s own Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model is expected to be added soon.

Perplexity says the big advantage is cost and privacy. Because processing mostly happens on the device, using it does not add up per-query cloud charges. According to VentureBeat, a company demo showed the tool reviewing financial documents entirely offline, with the usual running total of cloud costs “parked at zero.” In another demo, the agent analyzed a spreadsheet locally and then shared results to Slack, showing that offline processing does not mean the tool works in isolation. Portable Computer can also connect to services like GitHub, Google Drive, and Gmail, and always asks for permission before sending any data outside the device.

If a task is too complex for the local model, the system can send it to a larger cloud-based model instead. Perplexity has also added safety features, including a sandbox that stops the AI from accessing unrelated parts of the computer, and a block on unauthorized network connections.

The product works with existing Perplexity subscriptions. Pro is priced at $20 per month, while Max costs $200 per month, with lower rates on annual billing. The DGX Spark hardware itself is sold separately and is aimed at professional or enterprise users.

For now, Portable Computer only works on DGX Spark, but Perplexity plans to expand it to regular Windows and Linux computers that use Nvidia RTX graphics cards.

Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, along with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company’s annual revenue is reported to be over $750 million as of August 2026, with growth largely driven by its agent products.