Overview
- Perplexity announced Portable Computer on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, and made it available immediately to paid Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max subscribers.
- The product runs the agent on the user’s machine first and asks for explicit approval before sending any individual step to a cloud model, and Perplexity says work fully completed on‑device does not consume cloud billing credits.
- Portable Computer ships with a local inference engine, a deterministic orchestrator/harness, an OS‑level sandbox for safe tool use, and connectors for Google Drive, Gmail, Slack and GitHub so agents can work with local files and services.
- At launch it supports Qwen 3.8 27B and Perplexity’s post‑trained PPLX 27B with NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning expected later, and users may bring their own models or inference servers.
- The product requires NVIDIA DGX Spark or PCs with NVIDIA RTX GPUs with at least 24GB of VRAM, which makes adoption costly and targets developers, prosumers and organizations; an unconfirmed report that NVIDIA may invest in Perplexity could deepen that hardware–software tie.