Key points
- Microsoft opened pre-orders for its first Surface built on Nvidia's PC chip
- A separate AI developer desktop starts at $5,999
- Windows gets new controls for AI agents running on PCs
Microsoft (MSFT) opened pre-orders on October 7 for the Surface Laptop Ultra, starting at $2,599. Brett Ostrum, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Surface, called it "our most powerful Surface Laptop ever." The laptop runs on Nvidia's (NVDA) RTX Spark chip and goes on sale October 16.
Microsoft also priced a desktop for AI developers, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, at $5,999, and made new Windows controls for AI agents generally available. Microsoft announced the desktop pricing and agent controls at an event in San Francisco with chief executive Satya Nadella and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.
The laptop is built to run large AI models locally
The Surface Laptop Ultra pairs an Nvidia Blackwell graphics processor with up to 6,144 CUDA cores and an Nvidia Grace processor with up to 20 CPU cores, sharing up to 128GB of memory. Microsoft says the laptop can run AI models with more than 120 billion parameters on the device, with less reliance on the cloud. Those are maximum specifications, and the $2,599 price is for the entry configuration. Nvidia announced the RTX Spark chip in June.
The $5,999 Dev Box is sold only on Microsoft.com in the U.S. and ships in November. Microsoft is also going after Apple users directly, offering up to $1,000 cash back through November 23 to buyers who trade in an eligible MacBook Pro.
Windows adds limits on what AI agents can reach
"Agents are creating a foundational shift in how people get things done," Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president for Windows and devices, wrote on October 7. He said new devices from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other PC makers are launching alongside the Surface lineup.
The security piece is Microsoft Execution Containers, now generally available on Windows 11. It lets companies decide which files and networks an agent can use, with those rules enforced while the agent runs. "An agent cannot be its own security authority," Logan Iyer, Microsoft's corporate vice president for the Windows platform, wrote. Reuters noted before the event that Nvidia is trying to prevent a repeat of the hack of AI hub Hugging Face.
Price was the question before the event
Analysts told Reuters before the event that price would be the biggest question, after a memory-chip shortage pushed up the cost of PCs. When Microsoft first pitched running AI on PCs two years ago, the laptops were mostly priced below $2,000, Reuters reported. Nvidia recently raised the price of its own DGX Spark desktop nearly 75% to $6,950.
As of 3 p.m. ET, Microsoft shares were up 0.3% at $530.94. Nvidia was down 1.0% at $236.82, and Apple (AAPL) was up 1.0% at $336.95.
"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 before the event.
