Editorialvia CNBC
The always-on agent needs its own computer
In a single week, the AI industry acknowledged that agents are a fundamentally different computing paradigm. Perplexity shipped a $200/month always-on agent running on dedicated Mac mini hardware. Microsoft built Copilot Cowork as a persistent cloud agent with access to your entire enterprise graph. And Nvidia is redesigning its CPUs specifically for agentic workloads, with Jensen Huang calling them 'the bottleneck.' The chat-window era is ending — agents need persistent infrastructure at every layer of the stack, and builders who treat them as fancy API wrappers are building for yesterday.