Sovereign wealth funds want Perplexity’s AI on their own hardware, with no data access for Perplexity

Some of the world’s most cautious investors have a request for Perplexity: bring your AI to our servers, and do not look inside. Sovereign wealth funds have asked Perplexity to run its product on hardware the funds own. That arrangement gives them full control and blocks Perplexity from seeing their data. What the funds are asking for The request centers on Perplexity Computer, the company’s agent platform. The funds want the whole system running on their own machines, powered by fine-tuned open-weight models. Open-weight models are AI systems whose underlying parameters are published. Anyone with enough hardware can download and run them without calling home to the original developer. Under this setup, Perplexity has no access to the data. It also gets no usage telemetry, which is the behind-the-scenes reporting that tells a software company how its product is being used. CEO Aravind Srinivas described the requirements in an interview on October 12, 2026. He said sovereign wealth funds want completely self-contained systems. That includes the agent harness and the control loops, the scaffolding that tells an AI agent what to do and checks its work. Updates, according to Srinivas, ...