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Perplexity and NVIDIA have announced the launch of the Portable Computer app – a new solution that brings the capabilities of the Perplexity Computer system directly to users’ own devices. The official release is scheduled for August 25.
The key feature of Portable Computer is the ability to run complex tasks locally. The system works with a variety of AI models, digital documents, internal tools, and network resources. At the same time, your files, workflows, and the model itself remain on your device. Users have full control over what information leaves their PC, when cloud computing power is brought in, and at what point cloud usage fees begin to accrue.
Each task starts directly on the user’s personal device. If the local model encounters a situation where its resources are insufficient, Computer asks for permission before sending a specific stage to the advanced cloud model. Users no longer need to manually select privacy settings, configure routing rules, or switch between models. The system makes these decisions autonomously while the task is running, and the result received from the cloud is returned to the same local process.
Users also don’t have to build the software stack themselves. Local models, agent infrastructure, an inference engine, tools, application connectors, and a secure sandbox are all integrated into a single platform. While most standard AI stacks require separate installation and administration of each component, Perplexity offers a fully ready-to-use system.
Portable Computer can directly process local files, execute command lines in the console, read PDF documents, recognize spoken commands, and search for information on the internet. You can connect Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, and GitHub to the system, allowing the AI assistant to use data from the work services you already use in your daily activities. Program code execution and tool operations take place within an isolated sandbox on your device.
At the time of release, the system supports the Qwen 3.8 27B and Qwen 3.6 35B models, with support for NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning expected soon. Perplexity also fine-tunes both Qwen variants specifically for Computer’s needs to achieve a higher level of accuracy and reliability compared to the base versions. If desired, users can integrate their own model along with a personal inference server.
Portable Computer runs on the Linux operating system for Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max subscribers. Work performed locally does not require the use of payment credits – they are deducted only when part of a task is offloaded to the cloud.
Initially, Portable Computer runs on NVIDIA DGX Spark hardware. Support for Linux-based devices equipped with NVIDIA RTX graphics accelerators will be added soon, and a Windows version is scheduled for release in September.