Around the corner: Agentic AI PCs that cut token costs
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The new systems won’t be cheap, but they will likely cut recurring cloud costs — factors for IT buyers to weigh as they plan upcoming PC purchases.
Around the corner: Agentic AI PCs that cut token costs
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The new systems won’t be cheap, but they will likely cut recurring cloud costs — factors for IT buyers to weigh as they plan upcoming PC purchases.
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AI PCs that cut token costs? That may appeal to enterprises.
A new breed of agentic AI PCs promises to do exactly that. The powerful laptops can cut token costs by completing AI work locally instead of sending it to expensive LLMs in the cloud.
HP’s newly announced ZBook Ultra G3a mobile workstation and upcoming laptops from other PC makers have powerful GPUs and large memory pools designed for AI and graphics. The ZBook Ultra G3a uses an AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro processor, while laptops from other PC makers will feature Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip.
Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs have dominated data centers, but the company is now targeting a larger chunk of the PC market with the RTX Spark, which includes a Blackwell RTX GPU. The first wave of RTX Spark laptops coming from Asus, Dell, Lenovo, and other PC makers is targeted at consumers, with enterprise models planned for later. HP’s ZBook Ultra PC, on the other hand, is squarely aimed at enterprises.
Without connecting to the internet, the PCs can run agents and chatbots, generate video, and write code on AI models with billions of parameters.
“It’s the only PC where you have enough memory to run the large models, enough compute to run them fast, and at the same time, all of your tools that we’ve accelerated for years… are all working,” said Gerardo Delgado, senior director of product management at Nvidia.
To be sure, cloud-based AI models are more powerful and capable. But AI in the cloud is expensive, and these PCs can take some of the heat off those bills.
“People are starting to get either burned or really concerned when they’re starting to get their AI token bills,” said Brian Allen, manager for Global Z workstation products at HP.
At least 20%-25% of high-end AI workloads in the next two to three years will be running on AI PCs versus totally in the cloud, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Research.
The agentic AI machines won’t be inexpensive, but they will cut recurring cloud costs, which is especially important in the ongoing research and engineering work that produces multiple versions of a project, Gold said.
“We will continue to see more offerings in this space in the next six months, particularly as more vendors release chips specifically targeting this space,” Gold said.
Early AI PCs, notably Windows machines with Microsoft’s Copilot+ branding, offloaded some basic assistant tasks, but the ZBook Ultra G3a is an AI mobile workstation aimed at high-end enterprise workloads.
“I’m actually building large language AI models. I’m doing fine tuning. I’m doing inferencing,” Allen said.
For example, designers can use AI in Autodesk Revit 3D modeling software at an airport without an internet connection. That is made possible by the inclusion of Perplexity’s Portable Computer offering.
Designers can then connect to frontier models in the cloud to advance the project. Perplexity taps across roughly 19 frontier models to find the right fit.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers bridge the AI models with applications on the PC with a user’s permission. AI on PCs can keep sensitive data within the company’s boundaries.
HP has partnered with Perplexity on Revit, but “you’re going to see those MCP connectors really start growing and tying into more software applications,” Allen said.
HP’s laptop, expected to be available in October, has packed up the CPU, memory, and AMD’s GPU tightly on one chip, so data moves quickly between the components. That’s important for AI and different from regular PC designs that offer upgradable memory.
HP hasn’t shared pricing for the mobile workstation, but Gold said it will be far costlier than regular AI PCs such as Microsoft’s recently upgraded Surface Laptop 13-inch and Surface Pro 12-inch models with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus chips, which start at $1,199 and $1,149, respectively.
HP provides an “ROI calculator” that lets curious shoppers play around with the cost of running AI locally versus the cloud-based cost. “You can sort of say, ‘hey, this PC pays for itself in nine months based upon this type of usage,’” Allen said.
ROI calculators like HP’s “have a number of assumptions built in that may not be applicable to every workplace,” said analyst Gold. “But calculators like these are still valuable for companies to do some higher-level evaluation of options.” In some cases, enduring high cloud-based token costs could be worth it for complex workloads and bringing products to market quicker, he said.
Nvidia received an intense wave of customer requests for mobile workstations after models surpassing Opus 4.6 excelled at coding and rocked the AI world. “That is the poster child right now, in development teams, coding teams, moving really quickly into local hardware,” Nvidia’s Delgado said.
Delgado said agents on AI PCs are driving engineering apps like AutoCAD. “The idea is not to replace the architect,” he added.
Enterprises will take a hybrid approach to AI, with work being done on PCs, the edge, and in the cloud, Delgado said. “Everyone that tells you that everything is local is just trying to avoid the fact that the cloud models are improving at an exponential rate,” he said.
Most of the work doesn’t need cloud-level intelligence, and a lot of it can be done locally. Nvidia has tools that can redirect inferencing to idle PCs on a network — such as Macs and Windows PCs with Nvidia GPUs — to keep data in-house. It can also redirect to the cloud when needed.
“The next big thing in agents is inference routers that just point you to local hardware when it’s good enough, to cloud hardware when you need a bigger model,” Delgado said.
New hardware with fancy specifications is great, but it won’t deliver much if the AI engineer isn’t smart, said Deepak Seth, senior director analyst at Gartner. “You can give them the best tool, and they will still come up with the stupid stuff,” he said.
The solution to every problem is not just having more power, but “more power with the right people will lead to better results,” Seth said.
Artificial IntelligenceComputersComputers and PeripheralsLaptopsIT Strategy
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