Everybody wants a slice of the fresh AI pie, and Asus is offering regular folks the chance to run their own AIs locally. Probably businesses, first and foremost, but there’s bound to be a few units of its new “USB edge AI accelerator” kicking around nerds’ homes soon.
Asus on TOPS again
The full name for this handy little AI gadget is the Asus UGen300 USB AI Accelerator. It’s designed to plug into a computer and ramp up its artificial intelligence capabilities, augmenting existing processor-based NPUs with an extra 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second).
The UGen300 doesn’t look like much, visually, but its USB 3.1 Gen 2 connector slips a Hailo-10H AI chipset and 8GB of LPDDR4 memory into any x86 or ARM system it’s connected to. The company says the setup supports more than 100 pre-trained models “via the online zoo”, giving ‘regular’ folks a crack at running an LLM or VLM without needing to source their thinking computer elsewhere.
The Asus-made peripheral supports the TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, Keras, PyTorch, and ONNX frameworks and will run on Android, Linux, and Windows environments. It’s not going to replace an outsourced chatbot or even dedicated AI hardware, since there’s not nearly enough RAM, but it could manage basic recognition and interpretation functions.
Asus has announced a range of interesting gear so far in 2026, and this little device would be one of the coolest (for those who know how to use it). Unfortunately, there’s no pricing or launch data for the UGen300 yet. We’ll keep an eye on matters. As soon as it’s confirmed, we’ll update anyone who might be interested.
