Microsoft and Nvidia showed off the Surface Laptop Ultra in San Francisco on Wednesday, where Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage to introduce it, Reuters reported. Microsoft opened preorders for the 15-inch laptop, built on Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip, at a starting price of $2,599, with availability beginning October 16. The base model has an 18-core CPU, 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage, The Verge reported.
Microsoft’s product page lists a 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio and up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, a body under 18mm thick and under 4.5 pounds and a haptic touchpad more than 30% larger than the Surface Laptop 7th Edition’s. In its May 31 announcement, Microsoft says the laptop pairs an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory, for 1 petaflop of AI compute and local models of up to 120 billion parameters. The product page still says shipment depends on FCC equipment authorization, which the laptop has not yet received.
Nvidia announced RTX Spark on May 31. The chip links a Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores to a 20-core Grace CPU designed with MediaTek, and Nvidia says laptops and compact desktops built on it are also coming from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI.
Reuters called showing that agents can be safely contained on PCs a key challenge for both companies, with Nvidia trying to prevent a repeat of the hack of AI hub Hugging Face. On Wednesday, Microsoft made Microsoft Execution Containers generally available, a Windows layer that lets developers and IT administrators set which files and network destinations an agent may use and enforces those limits outside the agent’s control. Microsoft says Nvidia has built its OpenShell runtime into the containers, adding controls on agent access to files and inference services, network rules and credential management. Nvidia has said OpenShell lets users route queries to local models based on their privacy policies and disguise personal information in queries sent to cloud models. Nvidia made OpenShell broadly available in September as part of its Open Agent Safety Platform.
For Microsoft, the laptop is a bet that some AI work now done in its Azure data centers can shift to Windows PCs, where customers pay for the hardware, Reuters reported. For Nvidia, it is a path into a PC processor market long dominated by Intel and AMD. Analysts had flagged price as the biggest question, Reuters said, after Nvidia raised the price of its DGX Spark AI desktop by about 75% to $6,950 on memory costs. “Now the software is ready and the hardware is too expensive to actually run it locally,” Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag told Reuters. Apple is making a rival pitch, selling new Macs to corporate buyers as cheaper than paying for cloud AI.
Sources
- Microsoft: Surface Laptop Ultra product page
- Microsoft Devices Blog (Brett Ostrum): Introducing Surface Laptop Ultra (May 31, 2026)
- Microsoft Devices Blog (Brett Ostrum): Pre-order our most powerful Surface devices ever (October 7, 2026)
- Windows Experience Blog (Pavan Davuluri): Windows PCs accelerated by NVIDIA RTX Spark (May 31, 2026)
- NVIDIA Newsroom: NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI (May 31, 2026)
- NVIDIA Newsroom: NVIDIA Launches Open Agent Safety Platform (September 28, 2026)
- Windows Developer Blog (Logan Iyer): Microsoft Execution Containers: Policy-driven containment for AI agents (October 7, 2026)
- Reuters, via CNA: Microsoft brings more AI to PCs as it challenges Apple (October 7, 2026)
- The Verge (Tom Warren and Emma Roth): The Surface Laptop Ultra finally has a release date and a starting price of $2,599 (October 7, 2026)