Microsoft and Nvidia CEOs to launch Surface Laptop Ultra on Wednesday

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang will present the Surface Laptop Ultra in San Francisco on Wednesday, the first Surface built around Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip.

The laptop is designed to let AI agents run on the device rather than in the cloud, analysts told Reuters.

The launch extends a push Microsoft set out at its Build conference in June. At that event, it pitched Windows as a home for AI agents, software that performs tasks such as writing and testing code.

Last month the company also bundled its agents into a new Copilot app. Running more of that work on laptops could shift some of the load from Azure’s cloud onto customers’ own machines.

Microsoft first showed the laptop at Computex in Taipei in June, with a 15-inch mini-LED screen and up to 128GB of memory. Its RTX Spark chip, built by Nvidia with MediaTek, pairs up to 20 processor cores with a Blackwell graphics chip. Microsoft says it reaches up to one petaflop of AI performance.

However, Microsoft has not yet given a price or release date, and is expected to share both at the event, VideoCardz reported. Analysts told Reuters that price is the biggest question, because a global memory shortage has pushed up the cost of laptops and desktops.

Nvidia recently raised the price of its DGX Spark, a small AI desktop with 128GB of memory, by about 75% to $6,950, according to Reuters. By contrast, the AI laptops Microsoft promoted two years ago mostly cost under $2,000.

“Now the software is ready, and the hardware is too expensive to actually run it locally,” Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told Reuters.

The companies will also need to show that such agents can be kept safely contained on a personal computer, analysts said. Until now, Microsoft has listed the laptop as a pre-release product, with final availability subject to regulatory approval.