A few big companies are betting that data privacy concerns in the AI era will only grow, creating an opening for computing products that rely less on the cloud.
Nvidia this week unveiled that its latest chip will embed more AI capabilities onto laptops, challenging the hold that Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm have on consumer device chips. Perplexity also announced that its AI assistant called “Computer” will autonomously select which workloads to run locally and which to send to data centers, based on the sensitivity of the data. Other AI products have allowed users to manually toggle between the two — which can be tedious — but this appears to be the first case of automating that.
Personal processors are nothing new for gamers and the tech community, but adoption has generally stopped there, with expensive hardware and maintenance making it less attractive for consumers. Americans are also increasingly cautious about where sensitive information like health data and financial records rest. The percentage of US consumers worried about data privacy and security rose to 70% last year from 60% in 2024.
