Olares, the maker of an open-source personal cloud server and artificial intelligence workstation designed to keep data private, today announced the launch of Olares One, the company’s flagship device.

Every day, millions of users flock to AI services such as OpenAI Group PBC’s ChatGPT, the AI search engine Perplexity AI Inc., and AI image/video generators such as Sora, Vidu and Higgsfield Inc. These third-party services perform well, but they rely on having users send personal or sensitive information across the internet.

“We believe Olares is entering a market which is niche today but has vast potential,” founder Peng Peng told SiliconANGLE. “Consumers are eager for a change, but haven’t been able to define the solution, so they settle for the status quo.”

Today, Olares announced an alternative, an open-source, privacy-minded personal server that allows users quickly to spin up their own local AI assistant that can view and use their personal files, allowing them to maintain control of their own data.

The Olares One is designed to allow everyday users to build and run an AI model on powerful hardware without needing much technical knowledge. As large language models shrink in size and optimize for local hardware, smart, accurate AI locally is becoming a potential way of life. Examples include Qwen3-30B-A3B, which performs comparably to Deepseek-R1, a 671 billion parameter model that requires a very powerful AI workstation or cloud servers to run, at almost a 20-fold reduction in size.

Peng said the Olares One is designed to fundamentally provide a “personal cloud solution, not a personal computer,” which will allow users to access it from anywhere, at any time, with phone, laptop or tablet.

The assistant takes files from the user’s PC and other sources, then organizes them into a knowledge base and trains the local AI to understand routines, preferences, writing style and workflows. Featuring enterprise-grade hardware and production-ready open-source software, the Olares allows users to add “skills” and services to their AI assistant from a marketplace, without the need to learn AI programming.

Launching on Kickstarter, the machine starts at $2,999, making it competitive with other recently launched AI workstations, including the Nvidia DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer.

The Olares One is equipped with a high-performance Nvidia GeForce GTX 5090 Mobile graphics card, supported by 24 gigabytes of GDDR7 VRAM and an additional 96 gigabytes of RAM. The company says this powerful combination enables it to run open-source LLMs at a remarkable speed of up to 1,824 trillion operations per second.

On top of the hardware, the machine uses an advanced graphics processing unit management system, including a time-sharing mode that dynamically allocates compute access to applications and AI, designed to maximize efficiency and keep the computer cool and quiet.

The open-source Olares OS offers another superpower to users: It can be installed on any AI-capable hardware, with full features and no vendor lock-in. This allows power users to build their own device and run the operating system anywhere they like, providing a continuity of access should they rather have the AI assistant but want to roll their own.

Why would a consumer or developer want to buy a machine such as the Olares One? Aside from the obvious privacy-first considerations, the current model for AI services is subscription-based.

“Today in the AI era, a single user’s compute requirement can be 100 times greater, forcing users not only to trade their privacy for services, but also to pay subscription fees,” Peng said. “In this sense, while the initial investment in hardware is higher, the total cost of ownership over the machine’s lifespan is significantly lower.”

Peng said the Olares One is built to break the status quo, provide first-adopters and current AI users their own personal workstation and democratize access to the technology, models and software ecosystems available.

“We anticipate that, as model sizes continue to shrink further in 2026, Olares One will gain widespread attention,” Peng added.

Image: Olares