MICROSOFT UNVEILS SURFACE LAPTOP ULTRA WITH NVIDIA AI CHIP

Microsoft held its first live event in two years on Wednesday in San Francisco during the city's Tech Week, unveiling the Surface Laptop Ultra alongside a range of changes to Windows 11 and a wider vision for local artificial intelligence and agentic computing. The laptop is Microsoft's first device built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip, a system-on-a-chip first teased in May 2026. Nvidia's Jensen Huang appeared on stage alongside Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella to present the device. Pavan Davuluri, described as President of Windows and Devices, also unveiled a companion device called the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.

The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at around $2,600, with reports citing a more powerful configuration from $3,700 and top specifications reaching $5,900; one report said Microsoft's highest-end model was already out of stock. Configurations include either a 5,120-core or 6,144-core Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory, which Microsoft said allows the laptop to handle both gaming and AI workloads without a dedicated graphics card. The device is available for pre-order now and will ship from 16 October. The Dev Box, priced at $5,999 in an anodised aluminium casing, ships with a customised build of Windows 11 configured for AI development and claims a performance of one petaflop, equivalent to 1,000 teraflops, of AI compute.

The announcement follows a June agreement in which Nvidia said it had secured deals with Microsoft and other PC manufacturers to build AI- and agent-ready Windows computers around the RTX Spark chip, though details were limited at the time. During Wednesday's event, Microsoft demonstrated the game Gears of War: E-Day running on the new laptop, which the company said illustrated the unified memory system's ability to support demanding graphics alongside AI development tasks. The devices are aimed primarily at developers, according to the companies.