[Pictured above: The ASUS UGen300 AI drive powered by a Hailo processor]

Israeli AI chipmaker Hailo and PC manufacturer ASUS have unveiled a new AI accelerator that connects to personal computers via USB, designed to support both traditional AI workloads and generative AI applications at the edge. The device, dubbed the ASUS UGen300, is the world’s first AI accelerator to arrive in a USB form factor, allowing users to connect advanced AI processing to a computer much like a standard external storage drive.

The USB-based accelerator enables edge AI capabilities on virtually any computing device, effectively turning it into an AI-ready workstation. By offloading AI workloads from the host system, the device allows developers and enterprises to run inference and generative AI tasks locally, without relying on cloud resources.

The UGen300 is powered by Hailo’s Hailo-10H processor, delivering up to 40 tera-operations per second (TOPS) for neural network acceleration. It integrates 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, enabling on-device generative AI performance using the drive’s dedicated memory, thereby avoiding additional load on the host computer. The plug-and-play USB-C connection supports Windows, Linux, and Android operating systems.

According to ASUS, the device supports a broad range of AI models, including large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), Whisper, and a variety of computer vision networks. Users gain access to more than 100 pre-trained models through an online model zoo, spanning language, multimodal, and vision-based AI applications.

Average power consumption for the new AI drive is approximately 2.5 watts, making it suitable for continuous use on laptops and edge devices. The accelerator supports both x86 and ARM host architectures and can also be used to speed up traditional compute workloads, not limited solely to AI tasks.

Hailo announced the Hailo-10H processor around six months ago, in July 2025. It represents the company’s second generation of edge AI accelerators and is positioned as the first of its kind to enable local execution of generative AI models directly on the device, without requiring a cloud connection. The new chip builds on the vision AI capabilities introduced with Hailo’s first-generation Hailo-8 processor.

The Hailo-10H is fully integrated into Hailo’s existing development environment, which includes an active developer community of approximately 10,000 monthly users. The combination of a USB form factor, low power consumption, and broad model support positions the ASUS UGen300 as a potential enabler for bringing generative AI capabilities closer to users, at the edge of the network.