Overview
- Perplexity announced Portable Computer on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, and made the product available immediately to paid Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers on Linux.
- The package bundles a local model, an inference engine, a deterministic orchestrator, an OS-level sandbox and connectors so the agent can read and edit files, run shell commands and call apps without assembling the stack yourself.
- At launch Portable Computer supports Qwen 3.8 27B and Perplexity’s post-trained PPLX 27B, lets users bring custom models or inference servers, and will add Nvidia’s Nemotron support later.
- The system requires high-end Nvidia hardware — DGX Spark or RTX GPUs with roughly 24GB of VRAM — which means the initial audience is mainly organizations, developers and advanced enthusiasts because of cost and availability.
- Perplexity says locally completed work does not consume cloud billing credits and that the orchestrator flags sensitive data, shows what would leave the device, and asks for user approval before routing any step to cloud models.