Valarian Partnership Puts Perplexity Computer on Institutional Servers

Perplexity announced a partnership with UK-based sovereign infrastructure company Valarian on October 20, 2026, to bring Perplexity Computer inside institutions’ own servers and systems, including air-gapped networks isolated from the live web and other outside networks.

Computer plans tasks, coordinates models and tools, and carries out research and multi-step workflows. Under the partnership, Valarian’s ACRA platform runs Computer on infrastructure the institution controls and enforces the access and network policies governing that work. Institutions can have Computer work on sensitive tasks while retaining control over the infrastructure, data access, and permissions.

Perplexity said the offering targets organizations in highly regulated industries such as finance, government, and defense, where institutions need to control where AI runs, which information it can access, and what it is allowed to do, often on their own servers rather than in the cloud.

Extending Local Deployment to Institutions

The partnership extends a local-compute product line Perplexity has been building through the year. The company launched Portable Computer on August 25, 2026, which runs Computer’s model and agents on hardware the user owns, giving individuals a way to analyze private files and carry out multi-step work locally, with cloud access available when authorized. Perplexity also offers Hybrid compute on Mac, which divides tasks between cloud models for planning, research, and reasoning and a local model for private files and sensitive actions, with an on-device privacy gate controlling what information may leave the Mac.

Perplexity said the Valarian partnership extends that local deployment model to institutional infrastructure. Organizations can deploy Computer across customer-controlled cloud environments and servers institutions physically own. An estimated 45% of IT workloads still run in corporate data centers, according to Uptime Institute’s 2025 survey. Perplexity said the arrangement gives teams a way to bring research, analysis, and drafting into environments already governed by their organization’s security requirements.

Models, Enclaves, and Air-Gapped Operation

Institutions can run open-weight models such as Nemotron, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek-R1, and Qwen on their own infrastructure, connected to the internal documents and systems needed for each task. Computer brings together models, memory, tools, and isolated execution to carry out work using approved information.

Permissions can differ by workload. Perplexity described a market research agent that could use public sources and approved external frontier models, while a legal agent could work with a local model and its assigned case files with external connections blocked. Valarian organizes these workloads into what it calls enclaves: controlled environments with defined access to data, tools, users, and credentials. Institutions set the rules for which data and tools each workload can access, and the infrastructure enforces those limits.

Air-gapped deployments are more controlled still. They use only the models, tools, and information available inside the isolated network and operate without live connections to external model APIs or the public web.

Use Cases Across Regulated Sectors

Perplexity described example deployments in government, finance, legal, and healthcare settings. A government team could prepare policy briefings from internal research and budget documents inside an isolated network, with access limited to approved agency records. A financial institution could analyze confidential deal documents locally while a separate workload researches public markets through approved external connections.

In the legal example Perplexity described, a team could build case chronologies and draft memos for attorney review, with access restricted to the assigned matter’s files and approved precedents. In a healthcare setting, Computer could summarize a patient’s medical history and recent test results for clinician review, with access restricted to authorized records inside the provider’s controlled environment.

Security Controls and Availability

The deployment pairs Valarian’s infrastructure controls, which govern access to data, tools, credentials, and network connections, with Computer’s isolated execution environments, keeping workloads with different permissions separate. Computer uses sandboxes to contain code execution and file processing, with controlled access to the resources needed for a task; Perplexity said these protections help limit the reach of unexpected agent behavior.

Security teams receive audit records that provide visibility into access decisions and workload activity. Perplexity said Valarian applies consistent controls across workloads, so institutions can expand Computer’s use without rebuilding the same safeguards for each application.

Perplexity said Computer with Valarian is built for regulated institutions and other organizations that need advanced AI capabilities while keeping sensitive data inside their own systems. Deployments are available starting October 20, 2026, and organizations can email sovereignai@perplexity.ai to discuss a deployment.