A San Francisco startup led by a 19-year-old founder is betting people will pay a premium to keep their AI at home instead of in the cloud. Ghost has launched Core, a $3,499 computer with no screen that is built to run AI models and AI agents around the clock on the device itself.
The first production run sold out ahead of an Oct. 31 ship date, according to Founderland. The launch came alongside an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Abstract Ventures, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova also investing.
What's inside
Core uses an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF graphics chip from the Blackwell generation, 64GB of memory and a 1TB drive, according to reports on its specs. There's no monitor or keyboard; owners control it from a phone or desktop app, and it's designed to stay on so AI assistants can keep working in the background.
Ghost says Core can generate more than 87 tokens per second, roughly the speed at which an AI writes text, on a 27-billion-parameter open model. That's fast enough to feel responsive in a chat. No independent lab has tested the speed, heat or power use yet, Founderland noted, so those claims are still the company's own.
Who's behind it
Founder Javaid started the company with Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23. Ghost is reportedly assembling the machines at a facility in San Francisco, a rare bit of hardware manufacturing in a city better known for software.
Why people want local AI
Running AI on your own machine means your prompts and files don't have to leave the house, and there's no monthly cloud bill for each request. The tradeoff is the up-front price and the fact that the models small enough to run at home are generally less capable than the biggest ones from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic.
Ghost is part of a wider wave of Bay Area companies building hardware for AI, as chip prices stay high and more developers look for ways to run open models on their own terms.