The report highlights that nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is nothing if not passionate, and as he rattled off the impressive specs for the RTX Spark—a system-on-a-chip that’s powerful enough to run an army of AI agents on laptops and desktops—the outspoken exec described an audacious vision of our AI future.
According to the latest update, “I could totally imagine that someday there’s actually an AI supercomputer in your house and it’s running all of your agents, it’s running all of your assistants, and they’re doing all kinds of things for you all the time.”. “Here’s my theory,” Huang said during Sunday night’s RTX Spark rollout.
In a fresh development, but these agents are under our roofs, eh? Huang doubled down: “You have to have it in your house, just like you have a home theater in your house.” He continued: “You want assistant AI agent computers running in your house, and these in time become a lot more like R2-D2 to you.”. Well, OK, we’ve been told repeatedly that AI agents are the future.
In a fresh development, they’d save you money on AI subscription fees (kind of), and they’d protect your data privacy when doing things like triaging your email inbox or poring over your bank and other financial statements. The advantages of local AI agents at home would be two-fold.
The report highlights that it’s a compelling case, and while the initial wave of RTX Spark-powered laptops won’t be the best fit for 24/7 AI agents given that they snooze when their lids are closed, I can eventually see a fleet of mini PC systems that would stay on all the time, complete with RTX Spark-powered AI under their hoods.
According to the latest update, (There’s some nuance here, by the way, as Nvidia’s AI architecture will allow for more intensive tasks to be routed to the cloud, while Nvidia the corporation is staking its livelihood on powering gigantic AI data centers.). So that’s Nvidia’s vision for our AI future: teams of agents on our own devices, locally and privately.
The report highlights that fittingly, Google even has its own Spark in the form of Gemini Spark, a 24/7 AI agent that lives in the cloud rather than on local devices. But there’s also a competing vision, championed by Google: AI that’s mainly in the cloud, powered by Gemini and buttressed by the cloud-based Google tools so many of us already depend on.
The report highlights that and while the price of admission is steep—a minimum of $100 per month for a Google AI Ultra subscription—there’s no need to shell out thousands of dollars up front for devices that will eventually grow outdated. Like Nvidia’s RTX-powered local agents, Gemini Spark can do your bidding all day and all night, sorting through your email and even parsing your bank statements (if you’re willing to expose them).
According to the latest update, when Spark rifles through your Gmail, you’re entrusting Google with your data, much like we already do with Gmail, Google Drive, and other core Google services that store our personal files. Unlike Nvidia’s privacy-focused “AI supercomputer in your house” concept, Google Spark requires an abdication of privacy in the name of convenience.
As part of the ongoing story, you’re not on the hook for devices upgrades, and you can leave security matters to Google (aside from ensuring the integrity of your login credentials, of course). Also unlike Nvidia, Google’s Spark AI doesn’t depend on local devices that must be maintained, could be stolen, or is vulnerable to all manner of personal and natural disasters.
In a fresh development, nvidia RTX Spark-powered systems will be able to hand off the toughest AI tasks to the cloud, while Google’s most recent Android devices (like Pixel phones and upcoming Googlebooks) will be able to tackle more mundane AI duties locally. As I’ve noted before that the choice between local and cloud-based AI isn’t truly a binary thing.
As part of the ongoing story, or is the future of AI mainly in the cloud, similar to how roughly half of us depend on cloud-hosted Gmail for our email messages, leaving local AI mainly relegated to AI pros and content creators? 2026 is shaping up to be Spark versus Spark and only time will tell. But is Huang correct in predicting an AI supercomputer in every household?
As part of the ongoing story, his coverage of artificial intelligence interrogates the most recent LLMs, and how they can be used at work and at home to be best prepared for the AI revolution. “AI is going to change our lives sooner than we think,” Ben writes. “Our best way to adapt is by using it every day.” Ben has been a PCWorld author since 2014, and has covered everything from laptops to security cameras before launching PCWorld’s AI beat. Ben's articles have also appeared in PC Magazine, TIME, Wired, CNET, Men's Fitness, Mobile Magazine, and more. Ben holds a master's degree in English literature. Ben has been writing about consumer technology for more than 20 years, and now focuses his reporting on AI as it relates to the basic human experience.