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You can now run Perplexity's local AI agent on your Windows PC. Your gaming GPU can now moonlight as an AI agent. Sep 15, 2026 - 8:11 AM ET Karandeep Singh / Android Authority Add Android Authority on Google: * Perplexity's Portable Computer can now run on Windows PCs with RTX GPUs. * It runs AI tasks locally, keeping sensitive files secure and saving token costs. * Portable Computer requires an RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM. Perplexity has been rolling out feature after feature this year. After the agentic "Personal Computer," the company launched a new Portable Computer late last month for NVIDIA DGX Spark systems. Now, Perplexity and NVIDIA are finally making Portable Computer accessible to even more people. NVIDIA announced today that Perplexity's Portable Computer now works on Windows machines with compatible NVIDIA RTX GPUs. This means users no longer need a $5,000 NVIDIA DGX Spark setup to run Portable Computer. It also finally opens up access beyond DGX Spark and Linux-based systems. Perplexity Portable Computer runs completely on-device, with the AI models, tools, and the agent itself installed directly on the user's computer. This is useful for two main reasons: First, users can hand off tasks to the agentic AI without worrying about privacy because everything runs locally. Second, on-device tasks do not incur token costs, making them more cost-effective. For more advanced workflows, Portable Computer can still use cloud-based models. However, it asks for permission before offloading any tasks to more powerful cloud alternatives. Though Portable Computer supports Qwen 3.8 27B and a post-trained version of Qwen 3.8 called PPLX 27B, these models remain exclusive to NVIDIA DGX Spark systems. Users on Linux or Windows machines with RTX GPUs can only use Qwen 3.8 locally. However, Perplexity is working to add support for the NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model on both Linux and Windows. Portable Computer also requires an RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM. That means you'll need an RTX 3090, 3090 Ti, 4090, or 5090 to run it, or a professional workstation GPU like the RTX Pro 4000, RTX A5000, or RTX Pro 6000. None of these GPUs are affordable, but they are considerably cheaper than a DGX Spark setup.

HP Redefines the Mobile Workstation for the Era of Agentic AI. * 4 hrs ago News Highlights: * The new HP ZBook Ultra G3a, a thin-and-light 16-inch mobile workstation, supports advanced workloads, including up to 300B-parameter LLMs locally, with up to 192GB unified memory and 160GB dedicated to the VRAM, enabling users to simultaneously run multi-agent and professional AI workflows. * Perplexity Computer comes preloaded, including supported integration for Autodesk Revit, helping professionals apply AI to defined tasks without starting from an empty prompt box. PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - HP Inc. today announced the HP ZBook Ultra G3a, a new mobile workstation designed from the ground up to serve as a personal AI factory for professionals. Powered by AMD and enhanced by Perplexity, the HP ZBook Ultra G3a 16" combines workstation-class performance, local AI capabilities, and intelligent workflow experiences for demanding professional environments. As organizations move from AI experimentation to production, professionals still face fragmented tools, disconnected applications, and complex setup requirements. HP is addressing that gap by bringing together AMD-powered local performance, Perplexity Computer to complete end-to-end work, and Autodesk(R) ii] application support in one mobile workstation built for professional use. "Professionals need AI experiences that are powerful, reliable, and integrated into the way they work," said Jim Nottingham, Senior Vice President and Division President, Advanced Compute and Solutions, HP Inc. "With the HP ZBook Ultra G3a 16", HP is bringing a local AI factory and workflow-ready tools together to help customers apply agentic AI to their most demanding work." Local AI performance, engineered with AMD HP and AMD co-engineered the HP ZBook Ultra G3a 16" to support large local AI models, AI agents, and professional applications in a thin-and-light mobile form factor. Powered by up to AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 and up to 192 GB of unified memory, this single-chip system helps professionals design, build, analyze, and run AI locally without moving work to a larger system or relying on the cloud for every task. "Together, HP and AMD are ushering in the era of Personal AI, where extraordinary AI power moves from the data center into the hands of professionals. For years, the most powerful AI has lived in the cloud," said Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Computing and Graphics Group at AMD. "Now, with up to 192GB of unified memory and the ability to run models up to 300 billion parameters locally, that power is right beside you, working alongside you and your most demanding applications. The new ZBook shows what's possible when AI becomes truly personal, giving people the freedom to explore bigger ideas, solve harder problems, and bring their most ambitious ideas to life." This on-device approach can help organizations reduce cloud dependency and manage inference costs, while giving professionals more control over performance, latency, privacy, and where work runs. Agentic AI, ready for professional workflows The HP ZBook Ultra is engineered to run large local models, AI agents, and demanding professional applications at the same time. Ready-to-use workflow tools help customers apply AI to defined tasks without requiring teams to assemble hardware, models, connectors, prompts, and instructions on their own. "Professionals shouldn't have to build their own AI stack to put their workstation to work," said Ryan Foutty, Vice President of Business at Perplexity. "With HP, we're bringing them Portable Computer, a mode of Personal Computer that runs AI models, agents, and tools on the device. Work starts locally, and when a step needs frontier intelligence, users can choose to bring in a cloud model without starting over. Businesses get the benefits of local AI without giving up access to the cloud or control over when they use it." HP and Perplexity are enabling professionals to use AI more effectively with the applications they already rely on. Powered by Perplexity Portable Computer for Windows's MCP Connector to Autodesk Revit(R), customers can use local, on-device AI alongside their project data, keeping proprietary data on-device and minimizing cloud token costs. This helps professionals spend less time selecting tools, finding instructions, and writing prompts, and more time designing, creating, and solving problems. Additionally, Perplexity and HP have co-developed task-based Skills exclusively available to HP customers, designed to help users offload repetitive tasks and spend more time doing the work they enjoy. Mobile workstation performance for advanced workloads Built for all-day productivity on the go, the HP ZBook Ultra G3a 16" gives architects, engineers, designers, and technical teams workstation-class performance in a highly mobile design starting at 4.2 lbs. and 17.9 mm thin. A new thermal design delivers up to 81.8% higher TDP[iii], enabling up to 100W of performance for advanced workloads away from the desk. * Run complex AI models, agents, and advanced workloads simultaneously, including up to 300B-parameter LLMs locally, powered by AMD Radeon(TM) integrated graphics with up to 192GB unified memory, 160GB dedicated VRAM, and 55 TOPS NPU. * Support demanding design and visualization workflows, including Autodesk Revit 2027, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Chaos Enscape visualization. * Stay productive beyond Wi-Fi with secure 5G through HP Go connectivity. * Extend device life and simplify serviceability with an easily IT-replaceable keyboard and design features built for long-term use. A more controlled path for IT IT leaders are being asked to support AI adoption while managing cost, security, and governance. The HP ZBook Ultra G3a 16" is a new anchor in HP's broader agentic AI portfolio, alongside HP ZGX Nano, HP ZGX Fury, HP Boost, and HP Remote System Controller, giving IT teams a more controlled path to scale local AI. In addition, HP's new Local AI Value Calculator, available on HP.com will bring HP Z workstations customers a clear understanding of how moving AI workloads from the cloud to local devices can lower costs, provide valuable insight into performance, and help deliver faster return on investment for everyday AI use. By supporting local inference, large memory capacity, elastic scaling, and longer device life, HP gives organizations greater flexibility as AI models, frameworks, and workflows evolve. Pricing and availability The HP ZBook Ultra G3a 16" is expected to be available in October 2026. Pricing will be provided closer to availability. HP Inc. (NYSE:HPQ) is a global technology leader redefining the Future of Work. Operating in more than 180 countries, HP delivers innovative and AI-powered devices, software, services and subscriptions that drive business growth and professional fulfillment. For more information, please visit: HP.com. [i] Based on HP's internal analysis of competitive laptop PCs with AMD, Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm processors and configurable discrete or internal graphics as of August 2026. Most capable local agentic laptop PC based on the highest available graphics memory (VRAM) capacity among compared systems. Higher VRAM capacity may support larger local AI models and execution of multiple local AI agents, depending on configuration, model size, software, and workload. [ii] Autodesk, Revit, and 3ds Max are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. [iii] Up to 81% (actual 81.8%) higher TDP compared to the ZBook Ultra G1a with a max TDP of 55W and ZBook Ultra G3a with a max TDP of 100W

Why are AI companies opening cafes? Inside the AI coffee shop boom. Tl;dr. Anthropic ran a Claude Café pop-up in New York's West Village that drew 5,000 visitors and 10 million social impressions in a single weekend. Perplexity opened a permanent coffee shop in Cheongdam-dong, one of the most expensive luxury districts in Seoul, home to Chanel, Hermès and Louis Vuitton flagships. Corgi, an AI insurance startup, runs a 24/7 café that's become an unofficial clubhouse for San Francisco's startup scene, and just signed a lease three blocks from Madison Square Park in New York, in a market renting at roughly $394 per square foot. Cursor did its own version in SF. AngelList's CEO tweeted a poll about turning his office lobby into a café, and two weeks later it existed. None of these companies sell coffee. All of them are spending real money to make you sit in a real chair, in real cities, holding a real cup. Here's why that's not a marketing afterthought, it's the whole point. The premise. Here's what's actually happening. A cluster of AI companies, most of them selling something you'll never physically touch, a chat interface, a code editor, an insurance policy processed by a model, are opening coffee shops. Not branded content about coffee. Actual, staffed, operating cafes, with human baristas, real espresso machines, and rent. Anthropic's Claude Café took over Air Mail's newsstand in New York's West Village for a week, part of its "Keep Thinking" campaign. Visitors got free coffee for downloading the Claude app, "thinking" caps, tote bags, and copies of CEO Dario Amodei's book. Lines snaked down the block. Perplexity opened Café Curious as a permanent location in Seoul's Cheongdam-dong, a neighbourhood so expensive it's nicknamed "the 1% of Korea." At checkout, a touchscreen asks whether you're a Perplexity Pro subscriber, a yes gets you half off, a no gets you a QR code for a free trial. Corgi, an AI-native insurance carrier, runs a 24-hour café in San Francisco that's become "founder heaven," and has since expanded to Atlanta and signed a New York lease steps from Madison Square Park. Why the most expensive real estate, specifically. Here's the part worth sitting with. These aren't cheap pop-ups in overlooked corners. Cheongdam-dong is one of the most expensive commercial districts in South Korea, the kind of address luxury fashion houses fight over. The Herald Square corridor Corgi just leased into averages roughly $394 per square foot. West Village storefronts don't come cheap either. That's not incidental. When your entire product lives inside a browser tab, the location of your one physical footprint becomes the loudest, most legible thing you can say about your ambitions. Renting space next to Chanel and Hermès says, wordlessly, that you belong in that conversation. A company that could run entirely from a server farm choosing the single most expensive square footage available is making a deliberate, expensive statement: Scribble is not a niche tool, Scribble is a serious, prestige brand, and Scribble is willing to pay luxury-tier rent to prove it before you've typed a single prompt. Why coffee, specifically. Coffee is doing very specific work here, and it's not random either. A coffee shop is the most universally legible "third place" there is, not home, not work, somewhere you go to sit, think, and be around other people without an agenda. AI, as a category, has a trust problem baked into its own success: it's fast, disembodied, and increasingly associated with "slop," the flood of low-effort, machine-generated content nobody asked for. A café is the exact opposite of that reputation. It's slow. It's staffed by actual humans. It smells like something. You have to physically go somewhere to experience it. Anthropic made this explicit. Its pop-up was framed as a "zero slop zone," pointedly timed right after a competitor's video model flooded feeds with exactly the kind of content that word describes. Free coffee, pen and paper, a real book, a human barista, this is a company using the most analog experience available to argue, without saying it outright, that its product is the thoughtful alternative to the flood. The real currency: trust you can feel. As brand strategist Karine Hsu put it, "with so many things happening in AI right now, people need to differentiate, because everything feels like a commodity." When every company claims to be the smartest, fastest, most capable model, those claims cancel each other out. A physical space doesn't. You can't fake standing in a room. You can't fake a barista handing you a cup. In a category where the product itself is often invisible and every competitor's marketing sounds identical, a real chair in a real city becomes rare, expensive, and durable proof that a company is willing to show up in a way its competitors haven't. It's marketing you can't screenshot and dismiss as another polished ad, because you were physically inside it. Why it works. Because it inverts what people expect from a company whose product is entirely digital. The instinct might be to assume a software company would express ambition through more software, a slicker interface, a flashier demo. Instead, the smartest of them are spending money on the most stubbornly physical, human thing available: a place to sit down. That inversion is what makes it newsworthy in the first place, Anthropic's café became a story precisely because nobody expected an AI lab to care about pen and paper and tote bags. It also converts a one-time visitor into a walking advertisement. Thousands of people posted photos of "thinking" caps arranged on coffee tables. That's a receipt, physical, ownable, sharable, in a way a downloaded app icon never is. Tips to steal. * Spend your physical footprint on prestige, not just proximity. Where you show up in real life says as much about your ambition as what you say. Choose the location like it's a headline. * Counter your category's biggest weakness with your physical space. If your industry has a trust or authenticity problem, build a space that argues the opposite through pure sensory experience, not slogans. * Give people a receipt they can hold. A cap, a tote, a cup, something physical people photograph and keep, travels further than a digital impression ever will. * Make the analog choice on purpose. Anthropic didn't hand out screens. It handed out pen and paper. In a category defined by digital output, going deliberately analog is the loudest thing you can do. * Know the difference between a stunt and infrastructure. A one-week pop-up builds buzz. Corgi's multi-city, always-open café builds a community that keeps coming back. Decide which one you're actually building. None of these companies needed a coffee shop to keep their servers running. They needed one to prove, in a way no benchmark score or demo video ever could, that a real person could sit in a real chair and feel something other than being sold to. When your whole product is invisible, the most expensive thing you can buy is proof that you're real. Frequently asked questions. Why are AI companies opening coffee shops?+ Which AI companies have opened cafes?+ Why do these companies choose expensive locations?+ What was Anthropic's Claude Café?+ Is this a real trend or a one-off?+