The UNIVAC I weighed 16,686 pounds and ran up to 10 tape drives. It was the first general purpose electronic digital computer for business applications.

With its vacuum tubes and electronics, it was able to process 1,905 operations a second. Its processor and memory were roughly 14ft by 8ft by 8ft high.

The first installation of the UNIVAC was in 1952 at the Pentagon.

Just under 30 years later, a ballroom full of reporters sat in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, waiting for IBM to show them a “personal computer.”

IBM had traditionally been known for building room-sized machines, iterations of advanced computers stemming from the original UNIVAC, that cost millions and needed their own cooled rooms and trained staff.

Then IBM showed them a box with a keyboard and screen that could fit on a desk, for $1,565. The IBM 5150 had arrived.

The IBM 5150 wasn’t the first “PC”. Apple had the Apple II, a $1,298 machine in a case built to look like a home appliance.

But these two, IBM and Apple, with their computer boxes for the desktop, kicked off the PC revolution and minted fortunes along the way.

We’re now at the start of another computing revolution in the home.

But I’m not talking about the HomeView that Apple released this week, which I wrote about yesterday.

I’m talking about the personal AI computer (PAIC) revolution.

And this one is being fought out by Nvidia and AMD.

Where does most AI live today?

In big rooms, tens of square feet per server, thousands of servers in buildings hundreds, thousands of square feet in size.

These are the data centers AMD (Nasdaq: AMD) and Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) predominately sell their AI chips into.

But this week at OPC 2026, the Open Compute summit in San Jose, Lisa Su showed us that big AI can live in a small form factor right on your desk. Just like IBM showed in 1981.

AMD released the next Ryzen AI Halo, it is for all intents and purposes, a personal AI computer. The ability to run frontier models at home, billions of parameters in size on your desk.

The Halo runs AMD's new Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 chip with 192GB of memory. That's enough for AI models of 300 billion parameters and up. AMD says about it,

“AI is evolving from assistants that generate responses into agents that coordinate tools, work across applications, and complete multi-step tasks.”

When Apple and IBM set about changing the course of history with the PC, I’d argue we’re facing the same course altering moment with these at home PAICs.

Nvidia wants in on this turf too.

They’ve had their DGX Spark in the market since late 2025. Jensen Huang even called it “a cloud computing platform that sits on your desk.”

AMD and Nvidia are following the IBM and Apple playbook from the 80s.

My view is the PAIC ends up beside your gaming rig or laptop. It runs an agent that sorts the bills, the school emails and the calendar, maybe tutors the kids, organizes holidays and coordinates the family budget and investments. Maybe even one day soon enough, organizing the home robots too…

It’s not commonplace now, but give it a couple of years, and it will be. And it’ll redefine the value of AMD even more so than Nvidia.

It might seem like a silly question, but there was a time when the idea of Nvidia being bigger than IBM or Apple was silly too.

But things change over time. Markets open up, companies tap into a river of capital and value early and crazy stories can unfold.

Maybe AMD is one of those crazy stories.

They’re already on a hot run, but this move to really challenge Nvidia to the PAIC market might be the strategy that really unlocks massive shareholder value. I think Nvidia are doing it as almost a side project.

AMD’s approach appears to be far more focused on tapping into this burgeoning personal AI market.

The idea of a 300 billion parameter AI sitting on the desktop that becomes the “brains” of a household may be a foreign concept to people now.

I’m sure in 1981 a PC was wild and outrageous and so futuristic then too. Until… it wasn’t. And PCs became as commonplace as a vacuum cleaner.

I don’t think the market has really priced in what AMD could achieve if this PAIC revolution takes hold in the way the PC did for the last 40 years.

If it plays out in similar fashion, the idea of AMD outpacing and even passing Nvidia in value, might not be as wild and crazy as you think.

More soon,

Lewis Maguire