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Perplexity is partnering with UK infrastructure company Valarian to run its Computer AI agent on servers and systems controlled by institutions, including air-gapped networks. The reported offer, available from 20 October, is aimed at organisations that need to keep tighter control over where AI runs and what it can access.

What happened Under the partnership, Valarian’s ACRA platform runs Perplexity Computer on customer-controlled cloud environments or institutions’ own physical servers. Perplexity Computer plans and carries out multi-step tasks using models and tools. Organisations can connect workloads to internal documents and systems, set permissions for data and tools, and choose which models are available. The report says deployments can use open-weight models including Nemotron, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen. In an air-gapped setup, workloads use only the models, tools and information inside the isolated network, without live connections to external model APIs or the public web. Why it matters

Discuss: Would you trust an AI agent with sensitive institutional work if its access were tightly restricted, or should these systems stay out until their controls have been independently tested?

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