Name: Ghost Core
Brand: Ghost

Ghost, a San Francisco startup, is selling a desktop computer that you are not supposed to use. Core has no screen. It sits on a shelf, runs open AI models on its own Nvidia graphics card, and lets AI agents work through your email, calendar, files and smart home around the clock, while you talk to it through a phone app by text or by voice.

The pitch is ownership. Instead of renting an assistant from OpenAI or Google every month, you buy the hardware once, and the models, the memory of everything the agent learns about you and the processing all stay on the box. Ghost says personal data is encrypted so that neither the company nor any cloud provider can read it, that there is no subscription, and that the machine keeps working even if Ghost itself shuts down.

At $3,499, Core costs about as much as 14 years of a $20-a-month chatbot plan. Inside the stainless-steel case sit an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell graphics card with 24GB of memory, a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor, 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. That is enough to run a model of around 30 billion parameters without a data center. Ghost preinstalls models from Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 family and Google’s Gemma 4 31B. Owners can add others from Hugging Face or load models they trained themselves.

What the agents read is the whole point. Ghost’s site lists connections to email, calendars, finances, files, browser history, recordings, health records, connected lights, fridges, speakers and cameras, and wearables such as Whoop, Oura and Eight Sleep. Founder and chief executive Zain Javaid described the goal to TechCrunch with an example: Core “proactively sends you a notification that you might be getting sick because it sees your resting heart rate is elevated, sees from computer history that you were up late working on a project, and has seasonal context that it is flu season in San Francisco.” The smaller nudges on the company’s site range from reminding you to take fruit on the way out to flagging a clash in your calendar.

The privacy promise has edges. “No data ever leaves your home,” the homepage says, but Ghost’s support page adds that web search, email and over-the-air updates need an internet connection, and its privacy policy says those online features can send task information to outside services through a Ghost-run gateway, where third-party providers may keep it under their own rules. A 31-billion-parameter model running at home also trails the largest cloud systems on hard reasoning and coding. And gathering your bank data, health records and home cameras in one always-on box makes that box a valuable target. Ghost says a built-in firewall watches outgoing requests and blocks unauthorized use of stored credentials, a claim no outside researcher has tested yet.

Javaid argues that Apple’s Mac mini is general-purpose hardware buyers must set up themselves, while Core arrives with its models and agent software installed. “People sometimes give incumbents credit for having already built the product because they have the ingredients,” he told TechCrunch. His bet is that the hard part is software: how the model reasons over a person’s life, what it remembers and when it decides to speak up.

Javaid, 19, is a former quantitative trader who turned to AI after ChatGPT’s 2022 launch. His co-founders are Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23. Andreessen Horowitz led Ghost’s $11 million seed round, joined by Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova, and the company assembles each unit in-house at its San Francisco facility.

Preorders for the first batch opened on October 5, and Ghost says shipping starts in the last week of October, with a 30-day return window. The company has priced Core only in US dollars and has not said which countries it ships to, so buyers in Europe, Asia and Latin America have neither a date nor a local price.

The first owners will find out whether an assistant that knows their heart rate, their bank balance and their late nights feels safer in a steel box next to the router than in someone else’s data center.

Tags: Baker Mayfield, nvidia, AI agents, Local AI, Ghost, Andreessen Horowitz