Perplexity and Nvidia launch Portable Computer, a local AI agent for Nvidia GPUs

First look: Perplexity and Nvidia have jointly launched an agentic AI platform designed to run locally on a user's PC or workstation. Named Portable Computer, it's an optimized version of Perplexity's Computer AI platform, which the company announced earlier this year. The new AI agent lets users run complex AI workloads on their own hardware, bypassing the cloud and sidestepping steep token costs.

Speaking at a press conference, Perplexity's Nate Kupp said the new app carries the exact same UI as the original Computer platform and includes every feature needed for local inferencing. He added that some complex tasks may still require access to more powerful frontier models hosted online, but the app will ask for user consent before sending any data to the cloud.

Nvidia's Director of Developer Technologies, Nader Khalil, said the new app will let users lean on AI more broadly without worrying about data security or recurring token costs. According to Khalil, "Local AI has reached an inflection point," moving from a hobbyist pursuit for power users toward an indispensable productivity tool for everyday consumers.

Perplexity's Portable Computer consists of an agent harness, an orchestrator, and a choice between the Qwen 3.8 and PPLX local models, both of which scale to 27 billion parameters. The app will also add support for Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, Nvidia's free-to-use, 30-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 3 billion active parameters per token.

Benchmarks published by Perplexity show that on its internal Local Knowledge Work Bench, Computer running Qwen 3.8 27B on a DGX Spark chalked up an accuracy score of 82.6% while using 520,000 tokens, exceeding Pi's 77.6% and Hermes' 74.0% across 53 tasks spanning deep research, financial analysis, and document creation. On PPLX 27B, it scored 85.4% using 678,000 tokens.

Portable Computer was also the fastest on BrowseComp and ParseBench-100, hitting 66.7% accuracy on the former and 65.1% on the latter. By comparison, Hermes scored 43.9% on BrowseComp and 34.6% on ParseBench-100, while Pi scored 50.2% on the former and 13.9% on the latter. Perplexity says Portable Computer also used the fewest tokens across all three benchmarks.

Portable Computer is now available to Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers on the DGX Spark, Nvidia's Linux small AI desktop built around the Grace Blackwell GB10 chip, which pairs a 20-core CPU with a Blackwell GPU and 128GB of unified memory. It's also available today on Linux PCs equipped with Nvidia RTX GPUs carrying at least 24GB of VRAM. Windows support is reportedly coming in September, extending that same 24GB VRAM requirement to RTX-equipped Windows machines.