Perplexity’s on-device AI offering promises data control and lower token costs

Perplexity on Tuesday rolled out an offering that runs the AI entirely on a local machine, and that, it said, will keep “private data local and escalating to the cloud only when a task needs it.” The service, called simply Portable Computer, is a local version of Perplexity Computer that runs on the Nvidia DGX Spark with Qwen 3.8 27B or with PPLX 27B, a post-trained version of the Qwen model, Perplexity said, adding that a 30B open model is coming soon to the model picker. The orchestrator, planner, tool router, scheduler, durable task queue, and local search index all run on device. Portable Computer requires Linux as its underlying OS, with Windows support “coming soon.” The most critical benefits for enterprise IT are the Perplexity promise that data stays local, and that on-device work doesn’t consume token credits. Customers are only charged if the system is explicitly told to move compute to the cloud “for more advanced research and reasoning.” Doing as much work as possible locally is becoming a trend, as users seek to lower token costs and minimize their need for increasingly expensive high-end AI systems. “A user might want the confidential details of a term sheet to stay…